this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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The Snopes article is basically We have no idea what's going on. Here are some social media links, make your own conclusions. Which seems like the opposite of fact checking.
I think it's fairly likely that the abuse amounts to torture but Greta says that people should rather talk and worry about the Palestinians and she is right.
Snopes does this shit any time the liberal worldview is threatened
Whenever they have to confront the inevitable "liberal politician ate small children for fun" story, the conclusion is that whatever objectively terrible thing the aforementioned liberal committed was being reported on improperly so that they can justify giving it a 'Half True' rather than just 'True'.
They didn't do a rating at all.
Yes, publically available truth does not exist for this claim, which is why Snopes doesn't even have to rate it.
The fact that this is a woman who speaks truth to power saying it, a woman who hates lies and hates to lie, versus the Zionazi state...they obviously don't take that into account, because of what ScaredExcrement has correctly pointed out.
They'd give it a 'half true' if Israel showed photos of the torture, because they wouldn't be able to verify that it wasn't a photo op.
A true ally.
I really want someone to do a deeper analysis of snopes and politifact. I know FAIR and citations needed have criticized them, but I would love a deeper dive into that stuff. Cause there is something truly dystopian about them
edit: did find this great effort post https://hexbear.net/post/3784740
The "half-true" laundering is bigger with Politifact than with Snopes I think.
The Media Bias/Fact Check thing goes way beyond that. The methodic and dataset is made up by a random guy but is uncritically adopted by university researchers. So there is now entire field of study based on one guys sense of vibes.
Yeah that's why I want deep dives. The entire system of fact checking is a propaganda coup de grace. Western journalism at its core is deeply fucked, and so hard to critique in its totality because it reinforces itself. Any opposition is "fake news" or conspiracy theories.
The media bias research seems more, deeply unserious and fundamentally flawed rather than malicious to me.
Fact checking has the problem that it's annoying as fuck on top of all. I don't think that Snopes is actually all that evil.
PolitiFact seems a lot more clearly biased. Billionaire funded too.
The malice is in the worldview they are regurgitating. Creating this idea of objective untouchable journalism means every story that really matters, that they or their peers fuck up or skew is protected from criticism. So something like snopes backs up something like politifact which reinforces NYT, which regurgitates the state dept. The whole field is arrayed to lend itself credence and make us look insane.
I really don't spend enough time on snopes to say how much of that is going on.
I never use snopes, I don't think its specific quality matters much. Its the institutional legitimacy and the rhetoric that matters
One memorable snopes moment in the last years was Zionists getting mad at them for how they covered South Africa's Genocide case against Israel.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/01/22/israel-hamas-what-is-genocide/
I don't think that's NYT/state department line.
That's not how western propaganda works. They do not all follow the exact same line of thinking every time. That's why it works. You let some variance exist, you create a self-reinforcing system in which no one consciously thinks they are lying or obfuscating, but all stick to certain parameters. Its a deluge, not a trickle of approved information. Like with Assange they eventually started saying "hey this is bad, don't do this", but after they either stayed silent, hide the importance of his revelations, or did the damage to him themselves.
The machine does not need them to be in lock-step, in fact that HURTS the propaganda model. Snopes reinforces the NYT line by treating objective journalism as possible let alone the norm. It does not have to have the same prescriptions as NYT to do that. Also Zionists get mad at everything
With PolitiFact it's very obvious in what ways they are deceptive even from just reading individual articles. Not every single one of them but there is a clear pattern of deception. Articles regularly will have internal contradictions, or they put two separate statements in the headline, debunk one of them and call the whole thing mostly false. I don't think it's the same with Snopes.
I don't rely on either myself but I think it's good to know whether I should tell other which of these pages to stay clear of. With PolitiFact I think that's obvious, with Snopes I'm not sure whether Snopes isn't actually preferable for people low media literacy. With all the AI slop, having people checking in with institutions isn't all bad. It's unfortunate that those institutions are bourgeoisie but it might still be better than a purely slop based media diet.
Snopes is good for non-political stuff, especially the farther back you go. They used to do actual internet journalism history stuff, like where certain copypastas came from and diving into old forums.