How Snopes "Fact Check" Spam Undermines Actual News Stories

by Daniel Greenfield: The left's fact check sites are partisan narrative factories. Snopes is the worst of the bunch. It's unprofessional and largely uninterested in the facts. It also relies heavily on one obnoxious gimmick.

That gimmick is undermining actual news stories by spamming "fact checks" of crazy versions of those stories.

Here's how the gimmick works.

A news story unfavorable to the left breaks. Instead of fact checking the story, Snopes finds some warped version of it, either mailed around, posted on social media or on some blog, and "fact checks" it. Since the media's push to roll "fact checks" into Facebook and Google under the guise of fighting "Fake News" worked, that means the Snopes "fact check" now displaces the legitimate story.

It casts doubt on the actual story. Especially for people who don't follow the stories closely. Especially those who think that checking with Snopes is shorthand for verification.

Thus, for example, searching for information on Soros' behavior during the Holocaust takes you to a Snopes "fact check" of whether Soros was a Nazi officer. Considering his age and DNA, that's not possible. The only purpose of "fact checking" an utterly impossible claim is to divert attention from Soros' statements discussing how good and guilt-free his experience was.

Here's the latest example of the same Snopes gimmick in action.

The arrest of Imran Awan, the Dem IT staffer who tried to flee the country, broke open the story and forced the media to cover it. It also got Snopes on its toes.

Here's the actual story...

"FBI Seized 'Smashed' Hard Drives From Wasserman Schultz IT Aide's Home"Here's the Snopes "fact check""Did The Federal Bureau of Investigation Seize Smashed Hard Drives From Rep. Wasserman-Schultz's Home?"Snopes' excuse for this fact check is a site mistating a basic aspect of the story. But considering that the site linked to the actual Daily Caller story, and that the vast preponderance of the coverage got it right, there was no urgent need for this "fact check".

But this is a typical Snopes tactic. "Fact check" an implausible version of the actual story and by doing so you block coverage of the actual story and throw doubt on it. And then leftists can point to Snopes claiming the story was "disproven".
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Daniel Greenfield is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. David Horowitz is a Contributing Author of the ARRA News Service

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