News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Snopes Under Legal Attack from Salon.com by iron0013 on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @11:15AM (#21515223)
Eh, part of the reason why fact-checking "satire" sites became necessary is that some propaganda outlets have taken to using "it's just satire, bro" as an all-purpose cover applied to blatant lies that don't even try to be funny. The people behind "Q" and all the other extreme-right fantasy-world nonsense have a vested interest in keeping the line between serious racism/calls-to-violence/libel/etc and "just joeks" as fuzzy as possible.

Alex Jones, for example, famously claims to be a satirist when it's convenient for him (e.g. when he's about to lose custody of his kids, or when he loses a lawsuit to the Sandy Hook parents that he slandered), but demands to be taken seriously on the same exact topics at other times.

Re:Snopes Under Legal Attack from Salon.com by big_chungus on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @12:16PM (#21515829)
Except the Babylon Bee always writes satire and nothing but satire. It's not like they publish some serious stuff and fail to properly delineate factual vs. satirical reporting, they publish satire only and the "about us" section makes that clear. Your analogy attempts to demonstrate that the site is "playing both sides" and claiming to be factual and satirical, when that is clearly not the case.
Re:Snopes Under Legal Attack from Salon.com by iron0013 on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @12:23PM (#21515911)
It seems to me like they write some things that are obviously satire, and some things that a reasonable person would have a hard time differentiating from non-satire. This is what I'd expect a propaganda outlet utilizing the strategy I described to do.

Of course, we're not the first ones to be having this conversation. Here's Snopes themselves commenting on the phenomenon: https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/16/readers-think-satire-...

and here it is being described in the mass media: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/us/snopes-babylon-bee.htm...

Re:Snopes Under Legal Attack from Salon.com by davvolun on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @12:19PM (#21515863)
Sure, but, like porn and art, we can tell the difference between Info Wars and The Onion. A simple landing page on The Onion or Babylon Bee is all Snopes needs to do, whereas it's clear Info Wars has an agenda of spreading disinformation and it's useful combatting specific articles of theirs.

Last I knew, Snopes isn't and cannot be run as a simple application of objective rules. You can follow guidelines, but debunking the type of Info Wars, or Trumpian, disinformation requires more mental effort than that. If it didn't, if it was the simple application of objective rules, there would be little value in the site.

Re:Snopes Under Legal Attack from Salon.com by jacquesm on Tuesday November 12, 2019 @12:31PM (#21515997)
> we can tell the difference between Info Wars and The Onion

Correction, you can. But unfortunately not everybody can.

Re:Snopes Under Legal Attack from Salon.com by davvolun on Friday November 15, 2019 @02:47PM (#21548100)
You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time ... but in general, while people may be fooled by The Onion a few times, they tend to learn and do better in the future. - Abraham Lincoln - Michael Scott
Re:Snopes Under Legal Attack from Salon.com by beerandt on Wednesday November 13, 2019 @10:37AM (#21525279)
This I think, is the source of much of the disagreement:

1) whether content should be judged on it's intended vs perceived meaning

2) whether we should make an effort to reduce everything to be understandable to the lowest common denominator.