This text, which comprises about 50% of the Snopes article:

> Although it should have been obvious that the Babylon Bee piece was just a spoof of the ongoing political brouhaha over alleged news media “bias” and “fake news,” some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally. But the site’s footer gives away the Babylon Bee’s nature by describing it as “Your Trusted Source For Christian News Satire,” and the site has been responsible for a number of other (usually religious-themed) spoofs that have been mistaken for real news articles.

So, looking at your complaints again:

- The article _is_ false, it's just also satire, as Snopes points out.

- That is a claim. See above.

- Instructing FB on the truthfulness of media _was literally their job_.

- What are you talking about.

- Yes, they checked facts in this case.

I don't see how this is on Snopes at all. Facebook users (and even some news organizations) fall for The Onion articles all the time and report them as fact. Snopes debunks them - that's their job, that's what they have always done. Facebook failed to accommodate for satirical publications when they introduced their "fake news" flagging. This is entirely their fault.

Nobody was being fooled by this headline. The only reason to “fact check” something like this is to punish the satire site.

And Snopes knew exactly what the consequences were on FB based on their “fact checking” work.

So a satire site making fun of how badly the mainstream news spins things got punished for “lying” because Snopes told Facebook they were lying.

If you read the original linked article, it is clear that they had to manually go in and select the articles that they believed were false and people shouldn’t be allowed to see anymore. They could have simply put up their article, without calling down FB’s wrath on the satire site, but they didn’t.

No, the reason for fact checking something is to check whether it is true. Whether it is intended as a joke is irrelevant to its truth.

Are you saying you've never, ever seen anyone mistake an Onion piece for real news? I see it all the time, usually from uneducated people, racists, and new-age moonbats.

I can kind of see where you're attempting to go with this, but even then, it seems more like the fault is on Facebook and not Snopes. At best, maybe create a "false-by-means-of-satire" (to differentiate true or true-ish ones that are satire) flag so that if a site is going to just scrape the result ("false"), it doesn't screw with perception, but again, that's on Facebook.

> The part that says a satire article is "false."

it doesn't say that a satire article is "false", it says the "claim" is.

> The part labelling the following sentence a "claim":

> "CNN invested in an industrial-sized washing machine to help their journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication."

I'm confused here. Why is this an issue? They are going to fact check whether the claim is true or not. In this case, appears rather than prove CNN didn't, they're going with the "it's satire, people" approach. As is a vast majority of their content, it isn't about the site hosting the content so much as debunking the "claim" to include the initial purpose of debunking/confirming urban legends.

> The part where they instructed FB to stop allowing people to see this satire piece because it would spread misinformation.

They instructed Facebook? Seemed more like Snopes funnels FB data and FB does with it what it sees fit.

> The part where they knew their actions would go a long ways to potentially destroying the ad-based satire publication.

They provided data. Again, kind of on Facebook in this particular case.

> That's not fact checking.

I think they do a fine job fact checking. Where they probably overstepped was in thinking or at least agreeing to the prospect that their data was ready to be made sense of by a non-human user: I can go onto the linked article and can easily infer that CNN bought a washing machine to spin news is bogus and I can also get from it very obviously that the original post it comes from is a joke in the spirit of The Onion, Hard Times, or any other parody site.

And actually, back to the "false-by-means-of-satire": I don't think that'd work. Reason being is that I imagine it is the message "CNN buys washer to spin news" that is labeled as false. Whether someone linking to the original parody or if I created jsgosnews.cc and copied the original's content as a quote (with attribution. Actually, just kidding, because most of these "fake news" sites don't include original attribution as it'd probably expose themselves as bogus too easily) and linked to that. We know the original was stated in jest, but what if mine is claimed as if it was dead serious and that CNN really did this. How does the false, but satire work now?

Again, at least in my opinion, Snopes is doing it the right way. Maybe they need to rethink how (or even if they will ever again) be a fact checking data aggregation service, but I don't see a solution to allow it to truly be the be all, end all solution. So as such, I think they should just continue doing what they're doing.

Snopes manually reported the article to FB as fake news that shouldn’t be spread. That’s clear from the original article announcing the breakup. It wasn’t a machine problem. It was a decision to punish this site and Snopes made that decision, not FB. FB just let their algorithms run and trusted Snopes to do their job without prejudice—a trust that was obviously misplaced.

Most things that are satire are also false.