Demo: Snopes.com

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Snopes.com

Category: Fact Checking

Link: https://www.snopes.com/

Demo Leader: Ri

Summary:

Snopes.com is one of the first online fact-checking websites, which was featured in NPR in August 2005 as the “Urban Legends Reference Pages”. Created by David and Barbara Mikkelson in early 1995, which later became Snopes.com. The website became popular as an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends. It also got its very television plot in 2002 under the name Snopes: Urban Legends.

The site aims at either debunking or confirming widely spread urban legends. The site was also referenced by various news media, like CNN, MSNBC, Fortune, Forbes, and NY Times on multiple occasions.

Apart from verifying or debunking urban legends, the website also features news articles regarding various topics, like Political News, Crime, Controversy, Entertainment News, Conspiracy Theories, etc.

Reflection:

Currently, there are several fact-checking websites, like Factcheck.org, Politifact.com, etc. Among these websites, one of the earliest one is Snopes.com. Even the site has been proven to have nonpolitical affiliation by another site Factcheck.org [2].

I found the website to be richly populated by various topics and urban legends. I liked the fact that without even creating an account, one can browse through the latest urban legends and learn about their veracity. The site also verifies many of the urban legends in a short period of time like 2/3 days. One can verify the stories at a glance as they are mentioned upfront under the news’ image. Their description of the stories and the verification process are also quite elaborate.

I, however, found there “Hot 50” list a little bit confusing. They did not mention anywhere on the site (not to my knowledge) how they ranked this list. One of my intuition was that the ranks are generated automatically by the number of views, shares, and/or date. However, I found contradictions to that notion. At the time of my exploration, “Did an Iranian Woman Undergo 50 Plastic Surgeries to Resemble Angelina Jolie?” [3] was on the #1 post in the Hot 50 posts. Although there was another post, namely “Did Tokyo Open the First Human Meat Restaurant?” [4], which had more share counts and was more latest from the dating perspective. Interestingly, I also found that the later news was fact-checked by David Mikkelson, the creator of the Snopes.com website himself.

How to:

  1. Go to the URL: https://www.snopes.com/.
  2. The website allows you to search the site based on keywords or URLs.
  3. Searching something by keywords returns the urban legends which have been fact-checked by the website. The search results then can be filtered by Category (Fact Check, News), Authors, and from the certain time period (All time, Last week, Last month, Last year).
  4. The left navigation bar contains several features, which the website offers, like what’s new, hot 50, fact check, news, etc.
  5. Click on the “What’s New” option to get the latest fact checked urban legends.
  6. You can also find Most Searched urban legends on the right side of the website. Each post is assigned the number of shares they got so far. There is a similar strip on the side regarding Most Shared urban legends.
  7. By clicking the “Hot 50”, you can see the list of news that is currently ranked as top 50 posts. Inside every post, there is Claim, Rating (True/False), and Origin describing the urban legend. The post also contains the share count for that particular post along with sharing options to different social media, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc.
  8. You can click on the “Fact Check” option to get a list of urban legends fact-checked by the Snopes associates. The list of the legends is arranged from latest to the oldest. Each of the posts contains an image above which the category of the news is also mentioned, like Fauxtography, Viral Phenomena, Technology, etc.
  9. You can click on the “News” option to get a list of news written by the Snopes associates. Sometimes, they also feature news article from other online news media, like apnews.com. The list of the news is arranged from latest to the oldest. Each of the posts contains an image above which the category of the news is also mentioned.
  10. In the “Video” option, you can find the posts containing videos.
  11. In the “Archive” option, there are many posts all listed under different categories.
  12. By clicking the “Random” option, you will be provided with a random fact-checking post from the website.
  13. There is also several tags on the top strip of the website.
  14. You can subscribe to the Snopes.com via your email to get daily updates by clicking the option “Get the Newsletter”.

References:

[1] Snopes.com: Debunking Myths in Cyberspace – NPR.org

[2] “Is Snopes.com run by “very Democratic” proprietors?” – FactCheck.org

[3] Did an Iranian Woman Undergo 50 Plastic Surgeries to Resemble Angelina Jolie? – Snopes.com

[4] Did Tokyo Open the First Human Meat Restaurant? – Snopes.com

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