I'd agree that the fact-checking infrastructure is not well-adapted for COVID, or any kind of rapidly developing situation where the facts are not entirely clear.

As for Rosenberg, you're focusing on the terrorism and ignoring the convicted. She was not convicted of terrorism, or even of bombing buildings, but of explosives possession. The word "convicted" has to mean something. I believe that O.J. Simpson is a murderer, but calling him a "convicted murderer" would be false. If the claim was "convicted of felonies due to her involvement with a terrorist organization", there would be a much better case for "true."

Snopes is the one choosing which version of the claim to fact-check, though, so choosing that version to downplay the whole "helped bomb a government building" thing is not very reasonable here, just like the choice of saying that "convicted terrorist" can only mean "convicted of a crime called terrorism that does not exist" instead of the meaning most people would use which is being "convicted of a crime that involved bombing government buildings, which is a central example of 'terrorism'".

They are fact checking the particular claim that went viral on twitter. Nuance doesn't go viral. If you care about the veracity of the claim, presumably you will read the extensive explanation of the 'mixed' rating and form your own conclusions. That's why it's 'mixed' and not 'false.' You can't just go to Snopes and say "oh snopes says it's false" in this case.

p.s. the crimes she was convicted of did not include bombing government buildings, that part of the tweet is strictly false.

See, a normal person would look at this and say the bombing was the important thing, not the minutea.

They could very well have picked a different tweet, it's not like they're forced to pick this and only this tweet.

Both weakman and motte and baileys are old rhetorical tricks, they're not very convincing.

So now you're saying that the tweet Snopes responded to may not be unequivocally true, but there is some other tweet that was circulating about Rosenberg at the same time, circulating at least as widely as this one, that is unequivocally true?

In the absence of evidence for such a tweet, why should I consider the Snopes fact check a 'weakman'?

As for minutiae, that's the whole point of fact checking, to care about minutiae and not whether a statement just generally feels right. It's not about whether Rosenberg is or was a good person, it's about whether the specific claim made about her was unequivocally true.

I just want to thank you for showing how effective this sort of propaganda is. A weakman is whenever you pick an easy claim to rebut instead of the harder one, it has nothing to do with your made up rules about what should or should not be fact-checked that seeks to minimize their agency, despite no evidence of them following such a rule in the first place. And the comment down thread just points out how that 'rule' you made up doesn't even apply to begin with.

So why should anyone attempt to prove that Snopes is following this rule when I have yet to see any evidence that this is, in fact, how Snopes operates, when even if we assume it is their standard, they don't appear to be following it very consistently?

That's a very odd burden of proof--asking me to prove that they follow a rule you just made up--don't you think?

The function of Snopes is to address rumors that are flying around the Internet (originally via chain emails, now via Twitter/Facebook), not to address every claim anyone has ever made about something. I didn't make that up, it's right on the Snopes site: "...we fact-check whatever items the greatest number of readers are asking about or searching for at any given time" (https://www.snopes.com/faq/decide-fact-check)

If the claim that was flying around the Internet at the time was that Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist, that's the appropriate one to address.

I certainly don't claim that Snopes is perfect, or that their choices never exhibit political bias or bad judgment. But I think this case is an odd one to pick as the key evidence that Snopes is untrustworthy.

The problem is that this is transparent bias. They may claim to adhere to that, yet it's clear in other cases that they've picked far more obscure Tweets instead of the viral ones.

This is intentional manipulation, they already know that most people read headlines (which are frequently the least accurate part of any story) and ratings fill a similar role.

Worse, they'll later compile the ratings into statistics and spread the misrepresentations further, all while claiming that technically in paragraph 7 they did admit the thing, which is why that's called a motte and bailey strategy.

Oh yeah, choosing what to fact-check is a really powerful tool. For example, I remember a Snopes fact check going hugely viral a while back as proof that the reason people believed that antifa is violent was because of right-wing lies. The thing is, that fact check had to cherry-pick an obscure tweet with only a few hundred retweets - something Snopes wouldn't normally bother touching at all - because all the more widely viewed tweets about the exact same incident posted and spread by people with more reach didn't make the same error and matched what Snopes claimed the truth was. By choosing what to fact check in a misleading way, Snopes had actually helped seed viral misinformation on social media far more widespread than what they were debunking.