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.