Fact-checking satire is... a bit silly, don't you think? (Unless the fact-check of satire is itself satire.)

You can say that it's silly, but if it's applied evenly to either side of the aisle it's a little difficult to say it's culture war.

I said nothing about culture wars.

Articles from The Onion regularly find their way into mainstream news, and not as satire. It's this that Snopes is looking at.

Examples?

No, sorry, none of these need Snopes pages. It's too funny.

To you. There are a lot of people that don't understand other cultures all that much, or are missing context. It's easy to make fun of others.

TIL the Onion has a liberal lean.

Maybe they make fun of Republicans more than Democrats but that's only because it's like shooting fish in a barrel with the GOP. There's more to mock.

(INB4 buttery males)

I like The Onion; I'm not trying to bash them. I think it's fairly obvious which side of the aisle most of their writers are on, and it's been especially hard to miss since the 2016 election.

Wait, it sounds like you think mentioned that Snopes routinely "fact-checks" satire, as opposed to it being a random one-off miscommunication, is somehow counts towards Snopes being more respectable and not them just forgetting what "fact checking" used to mean one day?

I didn't say Snopes was more or less respectable; my point was that they aren't engaging in "culture war" by doing what this article says that they're doing.

I'm not crazy about them fact-checking satire, but it's incredibly obvious why they have to--because people treat them as a one-stop-shop for finding out whether an article is real or not. For The Onion that might be easy to answer, but there are also a lot of terrible, unfunny wannabe satirical sites, and people do get confused.

> my point was that they aren't engaging in "culture war" by doing what this article says that they're doing.

True, that ("fact-checking" satire) is not an act of culture war. It is a behavior that makes them very questionable candidate as an arbiter of truth, which Facebook seems to have anointed them to be.

> but it's incredibly obvious why they have to-

No it isn't. On the contrary, them confusing "checking" satire and checking real facts blurs the lines between fictional expression - which can't be rated as true or false as it is not a factual statement - and factual claims which can be evaluated as true or false.

> people treat them as a one-stop-shop for finding out whether an article is real or not

That's a bad thing, both from the point of view of robustness - that means that people surrender their agency and critical thinking to some random site on the internet - and from the point of view of choice of that single point of failure - by choosing the site that can't even go as far as distinguishing between factual statement and fictional expression and routinely confuses the two.

If they just said "The Onion is a satire site, the Bablon Bee is a satire site, that's it, move on" - it'd be fine. But the way they do it - to actually evaluate it as a factual statement and assign rating "false" to it - is mixing two concepts, and it's a bad thing. "Fact checkers" regularly commit the same thing by "fact checking" opinions they oppose as "false" - and that is very much a part of the culture war, an attempt to present one opinion as "objective fact" and the opposing one as "objective falsity". Snopes did not do it in this particular case, true - but they did it in other cases, as well as other "fact checker" outlets. That predictably hurt the reputation of the whole business.

I'm not sure if you are agreeing with me, or if telling you that your statement to me stated my own sentiment on these institutions better than I did and I found it ironic, and get the impression we might agree where the level of discussion should be. I hope that makes sense.

Not sure how I can put it anymore clearly. You claim that Snopes is engaging in "culture war." I point out that Snopes is evenly applying its policies to both conservatives and liberals, giving the lie to your original statement.

If you think snopes is an objective "fact" checker then you are too far down the rabbit hole.