This is so wildly nonsensical that it should have been obvious that this wasn’t even worth fact-checking. A story like “CNN buys laundry machines to spin the news!” is so blatantly obvious a joke that it is beneath the dignity of Snopes to try to investigate or fact-check it. The *Babylon Bee *is a spoof satire website, like The Onion. It would be like Snopes trying to “fact-check” a story, “is the Moon really made of cheese?”
The job of Snopes should be to investigate and fact-check only things that are plausibly believable enough that people would mistake falsehood for truth, or think something is actually real.
Yes, and there are Babylon Bee articles that are plausible enough to be believed by people not familiar with the Bee - for instance, their recent spoof article claiming that Jessie Smollett was offered a job at CNN. That’s something that could be believed if not debunked.
But “CNN buys washing machines to spin the news” is a laughably obvious joke. It’s pointless, and beneath the dignity of Snopes, to try to fact-check something like that.
There is a great overlap between those who can’t tell “fake news” and those that believe Snopes is just a tool of the liberal media and nothing on the site can be trusted.
In which case, Snopes is performing a worthwhile service for the more incredulous who come across such “facts” via social media or email and go looking for verification.
I had always understood that Snopes decides what to fact check based on submissions from readers, unless that’s changed recently. So if they fact checked a story that to you is obviously satire, it’s because a lot of people emailed them asking them if it was true.
Snopes has been going down the drain for the past five years, especially when they started pumping out fake news themselves. There were a few articles that used outdated or wrong facts and figures to prove something “True” or “False” and when I emailed them with the correction they ignored it.
They kind of lost me when they started making their own fake stories, and presenting them as real. Or, “real”. The pages still looked as real as actual debunking pages. WTF, Chucks? As if there isn’t enough confusion already (hence this thread) did they really need to start making their own?
I can beat that. For some reason, in the left column of Google News it keeps offering me “fact check” articles from India, usually about fake stories that I’ve never heard of and “famous” people I’ve never heard of. Right now there is a fact check from Africa being suggested to me, explaining that certain photos aren’t of a returned Jesus touring Africa.