Yes? Treating obvious satire as worthy of correction makes you look clueless. The linked Snopes fact-check says that some readers took the idea that CNN literally puts "news" in an industrial washing machine, which I find... difficult to believe.

If there's one thing we've learned in the last two years it's that what's obviously silly to anyone with broad sources of information and critical thinking skills may be considered plausible by a shocking number of people.

I would prefer that Snopes error on the side of stating the obvious.

I would prefer that people stop taking the word of Snopes about anything. They have zero qualifications, credentials, or expertise to pass judgment on any of the subjects they opine upon. It's a real mystery how they managed to get so many people to consider them infallible.

"Snopes said (whatever)" has exactly as much credibility as "Some random guy said (whatever)", i.e., none whatsoever.

Edit: in response to some of the comments below, there's a lengthy discussion of some of the problems with Snopes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

They always explain their sources and reasoning, so you can easily check for yourself.

They didn't exactly source their claim that "some readers took the story seriously."

I think the source for that is the fact that some readers reported the story to Facebook. The whole reason Snopes even fact-checked it is because they were asked to.

I think that's backwards. Facebook is using Snopes as a source for detecting fake news, so once this showed up on Snopes as "False," FB flagged it as fake.

From the article:

> What more likely happened is that some trigger-happy activists who don't appreciate Christian and conservative satire reported The Babylon Bee to Facebook, setting off an investigation by Snopes.

Obviously not a definitive answer as to what happened, but it seems plausible. Surely Snopes doesn't proactively fact-check every single article posted to Facebook, they wouldn't have the manpower to do that. It makes sense that they'd fact-check only after people report the story to Facebook.

And it'd be my guess that they probably source some of their topics to research based on search results where users abandoned w/o clicking a result.

Though I don't know that to be a fact as I don't work for them/speak with anyone from their team/etc., so I wouldn't try to leverage it in an article I'd write if I were a writer.

Someone else mentioned that along with the true, false, undetermined (or is maybe distinct? I can't remember), and true/false flags, maybe they should just bite the bullet and add a "satire" flag. Essentially you're saying, yes, it is false, however it isn't meant to be taken seriously. Then Facebook can either do nothing or flag it as satire which I don't know the correct path here: for me, most of the fun of satire is not being presented "it is satire" up front and then picking it up pretty early on. Then again, not flagging it as satire would then leave it open for people to assume that it is legitimate as it wasn't flagged as fake.

So unfortunate that fun can't be had anymore because some are generally intent on deceiving.

Aha, I missed that, thanks. So it looks like it's a two-way street for reporting/flagging. Could've been either one, but I think your explanation makes more sense.

perhaps they're storing search results where a user didn't click on anything (ie they didn't find the answer to what they were looking for) so they then investigated what the query "cnn industrial washer" or whatever was about and then fact checked it? Metrics are a pretty normal thing to capture.

That isn’t exactly the relevant question when talking about their reliability.

Do you have some examples of Snopes providing bad information? They're certainly not flawless, but it's a useful resource, and most of the people I've seen dismiss them out of hand seem to have a political interest in them being wrong.

In one case they deliberately provided a whole category of false information in an attempt to spread awareness of False Authority Syndrome.[0] They wanted to make the same point that the comment you replied to is making!

[0] https://www.snopes.com/lost/false.asp

Personally, because there are so many sketchy things on Facebook, this is what I tend to do:

1) go to snopes, search for the article 2) read the article, specifically using the links to their sources and reviewing those. 3) if still unsure, do some more searching. 4) if after steps 1 and 2 it can be deemed that, yeah, whatever was posted to Facebook was a crock, then I'll share a link to the Snopes article and in the case where there's a video being sourced, link to said video and pertinent timestamps.

So yeah. Used right, Snopes is a good resource. If you (not you you, you generally) just blindly take the word of anything regardless of the source, well, that's interesting.

Well, at least they are smart enough to know a satire site when it says "this is a satire site". Apparently, some people are not below admitting they are in desperate need of such service. Not smart enough of course to not confuse factual "true/false" ratings with noting that this is a satire, which can not be true or false since it is not a statement of fact (it's like rating Little Red Riding Hood story "false" because obviously wolves can't talk) - but this may be their premium service offering or something?

If Snopes didn’t provide references for their fact checks, that Forbes commentary would be alarming. As it is, it reads like a hit piece.

Are they biased? I’m sure. Everyone is.

Not everyone gets to kick somebody off Facebook because they didn't like them, though. Snopes has been awarded this privilege, for some reason.

So now we're going to blame Snopes for Facebook's failings?

No, we're going to blame them both for raising the level of informational entropy - Snopes for producing the noise like "fact check" of satire and Facebook for anointing the noise-machine of Snopes as the ultimate arbiter of truth.

Even Snopes themselves have tried to tell people this.[0] They created a category called "The Repository of Lost Legends" composed entirely of false, made-up myths and called them "true", to show people what False Authority Syndrome was. People believed them anyway.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/lost/false.asp

Poster on HN says Snopes has exactly as much credibility as some random guy. Got it.

I've seen worse. PolitiFact managed to fact check an article from military satire site DuffelBlog and just didn't seem to grasp that it was satire, at all. They wrote, in excruciating detail, about all the increasingly silly and implausible claims and at no point did it occur to them that maybe they should take them as a hint that the whole thing was a joke, an incredibly unsubtle humorous reference to actual events: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/nov/16/...

Did you read to the end? They clearly know it’s satire and have a thorough discussion of that.

Yes, I did read to the end, and no they don't. They treated it as though it's one of the many actual fake news sites that builds its business model around tricking people but hides away a disclaimer somewhere claiming to be a satire site in order to dodge complaints, describing it as though that disclaimer was the only thing tipping readers off that the article wasn't true. None of the DuffelBlog articles are exactly subtle, including that one.

They’re just stating the facts. Your claim that it never occurred to them that it’s satire is clearly wrong.

I’m surprised at this notion that nobody would have actually believed the story. Have you met people? A lot of them are really dumb.

This isn't "of course this is implausible," this is "there is not any actual physical way to conceive of this happening."

This is kind of why "fact-checking" this hurts Snopes' credibility. The only reason to fact-check this article is to take a snide shot at putative stupid people who think it's possible somehow to literally wash news in a washing machine.

People believe all sorts of inconceivable things.

Given how many people mistake The Onion for being real, that service is needed.

Just because it's technically correct doesn't mean it's not a stupid/dangerous thing to do.

For further reading, my favorite tweet of the election: https://twitter.com/nbcnews/status/785299709342654465?lang=e...

I don’t see why this is so bad. If it was anybody else, it would be obvious that it was a metaphor, but this is the same guy who said Obama literally founded ISIS.

Because they took the truth of statement, i.e. HRC deleted emails from her private email server, and labeled it a falsehood using meaningless semantics as justfication. Acid washed vs. bleachbit has nothing to do with the thesis of the statement.

How is that not bad?

A key part of the statement was that acid washing is very expensive and that proves bad intent or something like that. It was not a casual metaphor. https://www.factcheck.org/2016/09/trump-pence-acid-wash-fact...

Still ignoring the underlying point that the emails were irrecoverably destroyed and summarizing with 'Claims Hillary Clinton "had her emails — 33,000 emails — acid washed ... a very expensive process' and a reductive "FALSE" rubber stamp.

The vast majority of people won't read past the summary (or NBC's tweet). They will see the FALSE rating, and take from that that no emails were destroyed, which the wrong conclusion.

Oh, an even better quote: “In a very expensive fashion, used chemicals so that nobody will ever be able to see them."

He literally said they used chemicals. Are we supposed to call this “true” just because some emails were in fact deleted?

I’m not ignoring your supposed underlying point, I just disagree with it. The statement was clearly false. That there’s some truth to the general idea if you strip away the wrapping of confusion and lies doesn’t make the statement itself true.

If this were Snopes, they'd most likely use their True/False category where they state what is true and what is false:

True: Clinton's team destroyed emails on the server False: the process didn't leverage "acid wash", but something called BleachBit

Or something to that effect. Not a Snopes writer.

To give a recurring example, this is like the debate on gun control and when someone says "automatic weapons" or "assault rifles" and the other party attempts to shut it down there. That is what the tweet effectively attempts to do (countering the intent of the message by discrediting verbiage).

This isn’t a mere semantic quibble. It’s a blatant misrepresentation of what was done, with an attack based on that.

To make an analogy to gun control, imagine if a prominent person said that the Parkland attacker constructed the bomb he used to kill all those kids with a rare explosive that can only be obtained from the government of Ecuador, and implied there was something funny going on. Should we avoid calling this “false” because he did actually kill a bunch of kids?

Bleach is alkaline, quite literally the opposite of an acid.

Yes. They took satire seriously. That's very funny, but they clearly missed some clues.

“Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof....”

They didn’t take it seriously. They fact-checked it on the basis that someone else might take it seriously.

You can't be serious. "CNN uses washer machine to spin ..." sounds utterly ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It can only be satire. Who would ever say such a thing and mean it? Answer: only mentally disabled people. And who would take them seriously? Unless you think most people are so disabled, there's no point "debunking" obvious satire, and if so many people were so disabled, then there'd be no point debunking anything anyways.

It’s about as ridiculous as “Obama founded ISIS” and yet our President apparently believed that one.