MEMBERS ONLY Snopes Digest

18 February 2020 • Issue #4

1 Savage Memes, Lunar Dreams What do Charlie Sheen, scammy hook-up sites, and a space start-up have in common?

2 Behind the Snopes How Snopes investigations can affect the feeds of our journalists.

3 In Case You Missed It The most popular and most important stories on Snopes.com lately.

4 Snopes-worthy Reads Good stories we’ve shared amongst ourselves recently.

Issue #4 edited by Brandon Echter and Bond Huberman.

1. Savage Memes, Lunar Dreams

Last week, Snopes published the results of a two-year investigation that links a network of shady dating websites designed to trap users in recurring subscription charges to the start-up Firefly Aerospace.

Improbably, the initial tip that launched this story — spotted by Snopes General Manager Vinny Green (read more about that below) — came from the Facebook pages of celebrities like Cheech and Chong, Snoop Dogg, Charlie Sheen, and Bow Wow. These celebrity profiles promoted lewd, misogynistic, and sometimes pornographic memes that directed users to sign-up pages for fake hook-up sites, which then pushed people to a network of over 200 “niche dating websites” that operate with the same aggressive subscription tactics and use stolen images to compel users to join. These practices, a former Federal Trade Commission investigator told us, may be in violation of U.S. law.

Who ultimately profits from this activity? The evidence suggests an elaborate effort was made to conceal ownership details of these dating websites. But using court documents, public business filings, and internet forensics, Senior Writer Alex Kasprak untangled a labyrinthine network of off-shore holding companies.

Read the full investigation here.

Snopes-tionary Speak like an insider! Each newsletter, we’ll explain a term or piece of fact- checking lingo that we use on the Snopes team.

Memevertisements: A portmanteau of “meme” and “advertisements.” Used by our investigative reporters (aka The Dive Team) to reference entertaining, eye-catching, and sometimes NSFW social media posts that not-so-subtly advertise dubious products order to turn a profit off unsuspecting users’ engagement. 2. Behind The Snopes

Let’s talk about what’s going on with Snopes: the newsroom, the products, the people, and everything and anything that makes Snopes, Snopes. This week Vinny Green, the general manager of Snopes, explains how investigations can affect our social media experiences.

My Facebook feed is sick. It’s got an infection of sorts. The symptoms started a few years ago when I began following certain celebrities who had a habit of sharing very suspicious links to clickbait and fake news. I tipped off the Snopes team and we started digging.

Reporter Bethania Palma and I tracked down 29 fake domains that post to verified celebrity pages and published our findings. But within a few months, some celebrity pages found a new tactic for hoodwinking their fans: memevertising. Soon, Senior Writer Alex Kasprak was on the case. We were down the rabbit hole, one that would take us into the dark underbelly of affiliate advertising. The Snopes team sacrifices our own profiles and news feeds — following disreputable and disheartening content producers — so we can try to bust misinformation before it reaches you. Two major Snopes investigations have resulted from this. Imagine what we could accomplish when all of you are helping us. Send us tips here.

And in case you were wondering — no, my feed has not yet recovered.

Next time, you’ll hear from another member of the Snopes team about a unique aspect of working here that you might find interesting. Do you want us to cover something specific? Write to us here!

Web Developer Wanted We’re looking for a talented web developer to help us build the Snopes of the future! Apply or share with anyone who might be interested.

Read the Job Description 3. In Case You Missed It

The latest news and fact checks on Snopes.com.

The new coronavirus outbreak continues to spread and raise international concerns. It has also given rise to countless false rumors, some pernicious and others laughable. The claim that the outbreak was predicted by name in an old episode of “The Simpsons” fell into the latter category.

In a theatrical coda to U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this month, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tore a copy of the speech in half, leading Trump supporters to call for her to be prosecuted for the destruction of government property. Did she do anything illegal? Snopes looked at what legal experts have to say on the matter.

Rumors about the 2020 U.S. presidential election have continued apace. Last week, for example, Snopes received a flurry of requests to authenticate a newspaper clipping purporting that Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was arrested as a teenager for animal abuse. Our investigation led us straight to a run-of-the-mill “fake news generator” website.

Another Snopes investigation was prompted by news reports claiming construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall endangers a Native American burial site in Arizona. Tribal leaders and archaeologists say Monument Hill, part of the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, is indeed the location of such a burial site, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed that controlled blasting was being done in the area to prepare for construction.

If you know who “Uncle Don” was, raise your hand. Folks of a certain age will at least recall hearing stories about the legendary kids’ radio show host, whose broadcasts ran from the late 1920s through the late 1940s. Supposedly, Uncle Don was caught on a live mic at the end of one show saying, “There, that oughta hold the little bastards!” Did he actually make the infamous remark? Read on...

Have a story tip? Send it here!

Snopesing 101 Fact-check like a pro! Every newsletter, we’ll let you peek behind the curtain and see some of the ways we check shady information so you can check dubious claims yourself.

Wonder how we uncovered Max Polyakov’s tangled web of financial holdings? Much of that information came from now-public records like the Paradise Papers, the leaked trove of documents that reveal shell corporations and tax havens of the global elite.

We were able to search this by using the Offshore Leak Database from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). It combines four recent data drops — the Paradise Papers, the Panama Papers, the Offshore Leaks, and the Bahamas Leaks — into one searchable set.

Journalists go to great lengths to expose injustice and empower others to discover the truth for themselves. A whistleblower provided German journalist Bastian Obermayer with the over 10 million documents that would later be known as the Panama Papers. With the help of the ICIJ, groundbreaking investigations from the documents forced resignations around the globe. Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist who led investigations into the Panama Papers, was assassinated in a car bombing in October 2017.

Search the data yourself here. It’s an excellent example of how you can leverage public databases to find the next thread you need to pull.

4. Snopes-worthy Reads

What Team Snopes is reading across the web.

How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail Michael Shermer, Scientific American

On Facebook, Anti-Vaxxers Urged a Mom Not to Give Her Son Tamiflu. He Later Died. Brandy Zadrozny, NBC News

A Website Wanted to Restore Trust in the Media. It’s Actually a Political Operation Gabby Deutch, Washington Post Opinion

Fox News Internal Document Bashes Pro-Trump Fox Regulars for Spreading ‘Disinformation’ Will Sommer, Maxwell Tani and Andrew Kirell, The Daily Beast

How to Stop the Spread of Fake News? Pause for a Moment Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

The Original Renegade Taylor Lorenz, The New York Times

Have any recommended reads? Submit them here. The Pets of Snopes It’s true: The Snopes “team” was once just two people and a cat. Twenty- five years later, we have more humans and more cats (and even some dogs) than at our once-humble beginnings. We want you to meet our furry, fact- finding friends because, well, who doesn’t love a cute animal picture?

This week, meet Managing Editor Do’s crows! She writes:

“My husband and I noticed when we moved into our current home that a couple of crows liked to hang out all day in our backyard. We began feeding them and, lo-and-behold, they started having babies, a new mating pair hanging out every year. This extended family always seems to be within earshot of each other. When I go on walks around the neighborhood, one will sound the ‘Caw!’ alarm (“Food lady on the move!”) before a cloud of crows forms overhead, with the birds silently swooping down from wires to snatch the nuts I’ve tossed on the ground, and then back up to quietly wait for more. The little neighbor boy across the street christened me ‘Crow-Crow Do-Do.’ I think it fits just fine.” We hope you enjoyed this edition of the Snopes Digest. We’ll be releasing them every two weeks, so please add this email address to your white list and keep an eye out on March 3 for the next issue.

You can read the previous issue here.

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