David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes, has long presented himself as the arbiter of truth online, a bulwark in the fight against rumors and fake news. But he has been lying to the site’s tens of millions of readers: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson wrote and published dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times.
Said Mikkelson, “There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgement. I’m sorry.”
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once described by the New York Times as “a quest to debunk misinformation online.” It also highlights his penchant for trolling, something he was known for in the early 1990s, when he posted on Usenet forums under the handle “snopes.” At that time, he was so strongly associated with trolling — even tricking advice columnist Ann Landers into running several prank letters — that the practice was sometimes referred to as “snoping.”
Similar pranks and allusions to trolling are littered throughout Snopes’ site. For example, a section called “The Repository of Lost Legends,” which forms the acronym “TROLL,” contains spoof fact-checks with titles like “Mister Ed was a Zebra.” Another article, “Do People Swallow Eight Spiders Per Year?” which was penned by Mikkelson as a lesson to readers to always check their sources, includes reference to nonexistent tech columnist “Lisa Birgit Holst,” whose name is, in fact, an anagram for “this is a big troll.”
In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Mikkelson said that he created the Zarronandia pseudonym as a joke intended to mislead the trolls and conspiracy theorists who frequently targeted the site and its writers in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election.
He also used fake names to make it appear as if he had many people on his staff. And he was also a political hack of the highest order, skewing far left, doing backflips in order to prop them up, and using half-truths to declare right-wing talking points FALSE.
just another commie fuckhead meet the karma.
enjoy motherfucker.
Send him on a snope hunt.
Snopes is like CNN. There to feed lies and propaganda to stupid people.
This the same guy who blew a 100 grand on hookers?
Status:True
Face: Punchable
No not snopes?
If I had a nickel for every time someone said snopes had fact checked something me and Joey Cringe could treat the country to some pudding tonight!
Always knew snopes were liars.
If a liberal has an idea, they stole it from a moral person.
You can take all the Liberal ideas, place ’em in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and Hilary’s heart!
Snopes suspended an editor? I have to see if he may have let something true slip through
Fact of the matter is, Snopes is full of shit. Hope they get sued out of existence.
“Snopes Editor Suspended For Unscrupulous Journalistic Practices”
Since when does Snopes have scruples?
You spelled ‘promoted’ wrong.
What a dick. But we smart ones already knew that.
But I thought one of the qualifications needed to work there was that you had to be a lying America hating commie cunt?
I recall a news item a few years ago about two Snopes writers, with one being busted for pandering a hooker and the other being a pole-dancing hooker. Those who swear by Snopes couldn’t tell the difference between the sun and moon to save their (ignoramus) lives. pity.