MEMBERS ONLY Snopes Digest

7 January 2020 • Issue #1

1 Welcome Aboard! Thank you for becoming a Snopes Member. Let’s talk about what that means, and why you — yes, you — are so important to fighting misinformation.

2 Behind The Snopes Learn more about fact-checking, reporting, and more from the people who make Snopes, Snopes. This week, the Dive Team explains how they unmasked a massive misinformation network.

3 Since We Last Met We know, this is the first member newsletter. But in this section moving forward, we’ll keep you up to date with what’s been happening at Snopes: important team updates, fact checks you might have missed, and more.

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

5 Snopes-worthy Reads At Snopes we’re constantly keeping an eye out for good stories. Here’s some we’ve shared amongst ourselves recently.

Issue #1 edited by Brandon Echter, Vinny Green, and Bond Huberman. 1. Welcome Aboard

In 1994, the works known as the “Snopes trilogy” by William Faulkner took on a new life as the nom de plume of our founder, David Mikkelson, on Usenet — one of the earliest online discussion boards.

From those days parsing Disney lore as the Urban Legend Reference Pages, to the present-day struggle against election meddling and fact-devoid discourse powered by social media and Big Tech, Snopes has become a beacon of hope for all those who seek to discern fact from fiction. It’s a mission and purpose powered by the generosity and participation of members like you, and necessitated by an emerging reality that sees the diminishing impact of objective truth. Thank you.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Mikkelson observed, “Everything about the site since its inception has been a long, slow, evolutionary process.” Like Snopes itself, this membership program and newsletter will change and improve over time. We are eternally grateful for your backing, and we welcome your feedback so we can continue to evolve into an ever more formidable truth-telling service.

This special, members-only newsletter will show you how the hoax-slaying happens behind the scenes, recap the most important Snopes news and reporting, and present tools and resources you need to be a vigilant fact-checker yourself. We hope you enjoy! The next issue will be out in two weeks.

Truthfully yours,

2. Behind The Snopes

How Snopes works, from the people who make it.

It started with an instant message at 6 p.m. on a Sunday evening. Operations Editor Jordan Liles alerted our team about “The Beauty of Life” (BL), a Facebook page with over a million followers. “They’re claiming to simply be about the beauty of life, but they’re 100% political,” Liles wrote. “That’s so weird.”

By midnight that night, Liles, Senior Reporter Alex Kasprak, and Snopes General Manager Vinny Green had determined that the outlet was staffed by several former employees of The Epoch Times — a newspaper created and run by adherents to a spiritual practice and anti-communist political movement known as Falun Gong.

Over the course of several months, the Snopes team kept digging, uncovering a network of pages powered by fake accounts in clear violation of Facebook’s stated policies. Facebook declined to comment — that is, until they announced on the Friday before Christmas that The BL’s pages had been banned and accounts deleted. Facebook refused to acknowledge the Snopes team’s reporting that brought the story to light until after an ensuing “Snopes was snubbed” uproar.

Read the full behind-the-scenes account by Alex Kasprak.

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 talk about something specific? Write to us here.

Snopes Expert Network Being a fact-checker at Snopes means researching everything from climate science to pop culture to animal memes. We need all the help we can get. That means we need you, too.

Join the Snopes Expert Network, a group of everyday people who can help us check claims about, well, anything. It's simple — you tell us what you know a lot about, and we'll contact you if a story demands your expertise.

Join the Network

3. Since We Last Met What’s been going on with the Snopes team.

Another year, and another decade, in the rearview. We learned a lot in 2019: how misinformation networks organize online, about U.S. politicians past and present, and about that everlasting enigma, Goofy. Take a look back at what we accomplished together in our annual Year in Review.

In December, Snopes Founder David Mikkelson and Senior Reporter Alex Kasprak spoke with Geekwire about Snopes, the state of the news, Facebook, and the 2020 election. “It’s going to be a mess.”

A legal update: After we won a successful anti-SLAPP motion in August 2019, an appeal filed by our opposition put the lawsuit on hold for quite a long time; then the case was stayed. Snopes members make our work possible, in spite of challenges like this. If you’re interested in contributing more to help defray our legal expenses, consider supporting us on GoFundMe or making an additional gift here.

Operations Editor Jordan Liles and General Manager Vinny Green spoke on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” about The BL investigation and Facebook’s “ineffectual” relationship with fact- checkers.

Sometimes working in a remote newsroom means months go by before we actually meet our coworkers. In December, the senior leadership of Snopes finally met in person at the ribbon- cutting for the Center for an Informed Public in Seattle, Washington. (From left) Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni, Snopes Founder/CEO David Mikkelson, and General Manager Vinny Green in Seattle, Washington, in December 2019.

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.

Fauxtography: A misleading image on the internet. Misleading images can be digitally manipulated, like this edited picture of an enormous dog, or have a misleading caption, like this miniature figurine of a bird.

4. In Case You Missed It

The latest news and fact checks on Snopes.com.

At the end of 2019, one of the top stories our readers asked Snopes to fact-check was a school bus bullying incident allegedly motivated by politics.

Another common request for verification: author J.K. Rowling’s much-criticized defense of a woman who lost her job for expressing trans-skepticism and trans-exclusionary views.

Also in the running, a tweet from President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign claiming that Democratic U.S. Rep. James Clyburn called for the president to be “hanged” for impeachable crimes.

Americans were left scratching their heads when Trump once again claimed credit for people “saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again,” though they had never really stopped.

Is it true that 10,150 Americans were killed by “illegal immigrants” in 2018, for example? Not even close.

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.

How to Reverse Image Search with Google

Holy sharks swimming down a street, Snopers! Fake or misattributed images tend to pop up over and over again. If you ever come across an image with a caption too good to be true, try a reverse image search. It’s easy. If you use Google Chrome, just right-click the image and select Search Google for Image (on other browsers, you can go to this page and either upload the image or copy the image URL). The results will show you some of the places on the internet the image appears — other websites, news sources, and possibly a Snopes fact check. You can submit questionable images for Snopes to review here.

Pro tip: If the image has different captions or attributions on different sites, you should be suspicious

5. Snopes-worthy Reads

What Team Snopes is reading across the web.

What Did Authenticity in Food Mean in 2019? Jaya Saxena, Eater

Are We At Peak Boycott? Collier Meyerson, New York Magazine

Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, The New York Times

Disinformation' Is The Word Of The Year — And A Sign Of What's To Come Geoff Nunberg, “Fresh Air”

The New American Homeless Brian Goldstone, The New Republic

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 Engagement Editor Bond’s cat Noodles! She loves sitting on heat registers, chasing rubber bands, and busting misinformation networks. Thanks for reading the first 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 January 21 for the next issue.

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