I am truly asking this. I am not giving an answer. And man, I was much happier when I was avoiding politics, before I somehow got sucked in in October as the election heated up. After this I am going to go back to interesting anthropology bits, evolutionary psychology as it relates to current mating patterns (I still have one son in Duxbury unattached; and it fits into my next category as well), nostalgia - especially on YouTube, and CS Lewis/Inklings.
I used to love Snopes, and over a decade ago that a Snopes-like site in Arabic would do the world a lot of good. Then I started getting reports it was slanted left and eventually followed up on a crazy-sounding idea that the Chines were using parts of aborted fetuses to make cosmetics. Snopes said this was "False." Not even "Mixed." But their own description revealed that Okay, not everyone does it. And even those who do don't do it a lot. We don't think. Though it's hard to get a straight answer out of China. I didn't think that qualified as "false," and subsequent uses around 2010 revealed some odd political slants as well. It was likely a decade ago that I learned that the couple had divorced and the man had remarried a very liberal woman who was injecting interpretation. Though it is a vague memory at this point and I don't much care I hadn't been back.
But the challenge was issued in the comments on another site that Kamala had slept her way to the top and this was airily dismissed as having been debunked, so I googled it, and got a lot of other links about her, including her Wikipedia entry that acknowledged she had "dated" him and he had appointed her to some entry-level political positions. When I put in Kamala Harris Willie Brown I did finally get links that addressed the issue, including Snopes. So I bit. Snopes called the accusation "Mixed," and acknowledged that they had dated when she was 29 and he was 60. Umm...He had separated from his wife for over a decade but was still technically married. Well, read it yourself. To me it looks like they are explaining away a fair bit. She slept her way to the middle, then affirmative action took over for her rise. The Wiki entry talks about people who praised her career as a prosecutor, listing the terrible kinds of people that all prosecutors prosecute. I have read other descriptions that she made her bones offering young black men terrible plea deals, the usual way of dealing with backlogs. I am not in a position to judge that either way.
But give this background story to some other candidate and what would we say?
Have any of you used Snopes recently for anything political? What's your take?
2 comments:
Over the past year I've seen many examples of people responding on social media to posts of media articles with calumnies against Republicans with comments such as
"even Snopes says this isn't true!"
So I think it is a change at Snopes.
My suspicion is that they've come to understand that they can't get away with it anymore while keeping any residual credibility.
As to why they can't get away with it anymore, I don't know. Twitter 'community notes' may well be a part.
I've not had any successes with Snopes, but I've been quite successful with e.g.: Reuters Fact-Check when I email the author and c.c. their editor with a polite note containing credible-source context and simple-language (ELI5) explanation showing how tendentious their interpretation was. Perhaps the weight of others sending polite corrections of their incorrect fact-checks has had a positive influence?
If I recall correctly Snopes made quite a splash, at least on the Republican side, this spring by rating the claim that Trump specifically referred to neo-Nazi marchers in Charlotte as 'fine people' as false
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