No personal attacks today.In recent years we've seen a proliferation of self-appointed "fact check" websites. All claim to be selfless, impartial, politically neutral bastions of accuracy whose only concern is battling fake news.
A closer look at these organizations, however, tends to show the exact opposite. In this article, we'll take a long, hard look at the highly dysfunctional outfit known as Snopes, one of the oldest and best-known fact check sites.
Snopes began life as a novel website 'debunking' urban legends, and in its early days had more in common with the popular TV show Mythbusters than sites like FactCheck.org or PolitiFact. But over the years, Snopes became increasingly political. As with most of its 'fact checking' brethren, that increasingly political stance has been a distinctly left-leaning one.
Snopes bills itself as "the internet’s definitive fact-checking resource." The self-proclaimed debunking site was founded by husband-and-wife team Barbara and David Mikkelson, who used a letterhead claiming they were a non-existent society to start their research.
They are now divorced, with Barbara claiming in legal filings her ex-husband embezzled $98,000 of company money and spent it on "himself and prostitutes."
Meanwhile, David's new wife Elyssa Young is employed by the website as an administrator. She has previously worked as an escort and porn actress.
Let’s leave other posters wives out of this.
Rosco.
