To be honest, I’m a little surprised at how naive some people are and that I even have to write this. “Fact checking” is mostly corporate and political propaganda. That’s harmful because it distorts our sense of truth vs. falsehood. A people who don’t know what’s real, struggle navigating reality.
Snopes.com was the website most used and referenced by “fact checkers” prior to 2020. It assists Reuters, Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Facebook and many others in “finding the facts”.
The guy who runs and writes for Snopes is himself a fraud.
Quoted from the Article: The CEO of fact-checking site Snopes was caught plagiarizing dozens of articles.
Snopes, the website that advertises itself as, “the internet’s definitive fact-checking resource,” is facing a major plagiarism scandal: The site’s CEO and cofounder, David Mikkelson, just admitted to plagiarizing dozens of Snopes articles.
“Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop,” Snopes executives said in a statement. “It has no place in any context within this organization.
To that end, Mikkelson’s publishing rights have been revoked. He remains a 50% shareholder and the company’s CEO.
“I engaged in multiple serious copyright violations of content that Snopes didn’t have rights to use, Mikkelson said in a statement. “There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgement. I am sorry.”
The plagiarized pieces were taken from major news outlets like The Guardian, and published under at least three separate bylines. Mikkelson’s own name was tied to some, as was the general “Snopes Staff” byline and a pseudonym Mikkelson set up under the byline Jeff Zarronandia.
These professional “debunkers” make a career of pretending to be concerned about truth and integrity.
And these are only the things Mikkelson has admitted to, after he was caught.
Looking more closely, we find that Mikkelson has a pattern of fraudulent behavior that goes back for decades.
Quoted from the Article: Snopes co-founder accused of Fraud against homeless veteran
Sunrhys, LLC, a Tacoma-based landlord and property management company, agreed to pay $16,618 to resolve allegations it overcharged a tenant and then fraudulently obtained funds from the federal government through a federal program that provides housing to homeless veterans, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington’s Eastern District.
Prior to Tuesday, Mikkelson and his wife, Elyssa Young, were listed as managers of Sunrhys, LLC. Tacoma-based North x Northwest Law Group was the registered agent.
Apparently Mikkelson paid a settlement for something he later claimed he wasn’t involved in. If he wasn’t involved, why the pay-off? He also quickly made as if he is no longer the manager of the company, after the issue became public.
Reached by phone Tuesday, Mikkelson told The News Tribune the property at the center of the fraud complaint had been primarily managed by Young and that he was not involved in communications with the tenant. He only learned of the case when it went to court, where he agreed to settle. He previously filed to remove Young from management, he said.
First he throws his wife under the bus by saying “it wasn’t me, it was her!”. Then he claims he knew nothing about it and wants us to believe that he wanted his own wife removed from management.
Mrs. Young wasn’t the first wife he betrayed. He betrayed his former wife too:
Quoted from Article Debunker of Fake News is locked in a nasty legal dispute
After more than two decades battling internet hoaxes, retouched photos, and other fake news, David Mikkelson, co-founder of Snopes, faces a much larger and more existential adversary.
Since 2017, Mikkelson has been locked in a nasty legal dispute with former business associates over control of Snopes, the pioneering fact-checking website that Mikkelson launched with a former wife in 1994 and which he now runs with his current wife from their house in Tacoma, Wash.
The dispute, which is playing out in the California courts, has generated claims and counterclaims of financial mismanagement, conspiracy and embezzlement. Mikkelson stands accused of, among other things, using company funds for “lavish” vacations, while he in turn levels accusations of fraud.
And quoted from Article Snopes Founder accused of putting prostitutes on his honeymoon expenses
Fact-checking website Snopes is on the verge of financial collapse after its owner was accused of embezzling company funds to pay for his contentious divorce battle and lavish overseas trips with his new wife, a former Las Vegas escort and porn actress.
…
After the presidential election, Snopes was chosen by Facebook to sit on a panel of arbiters who would determine whether news stories posted to the social media site were ‘fake news.’
But at the same time, DailyMail.com revealed in December, the two co-founders were involved in a bitter divorce battle in which he was accused of embezzling nearly $100,000 in company funds to spend on personal expenses and prostitutes.
Barbara asked a court at the time to restrict Mikkelson’s bank access, claiming his wild spending was going to deplete the company’s accounts.
We are looking at Embezzlement, Plagarism, Tax Fraud and other schemes of betrayal. That’s the type of person Facebook puts in charge of your daily “fact checking”. I laugh out loud as I write this.
Not that I’m surprised. Snopes does only a little genuine debunking, to appear legitimate. But much of their work serves to cover up facts to protect their corporate and governmental sponsors. Snopes articles make generous use of straw men.
They focus one easily refutable aspects of a story, usually by linking to junk-websites. For example, I could write a really well-researched article on a paranormal phenomenon, but they wouldn’t link to my article when “debunking” it, but rather some trashy, poorly written article. I strongly suspect that Snopes itself, sets up some of these websites it uses for their “debunking”. The fraudulent “facts” are then used by Social Media and Mass Media outlets to suppress relevant information. Because Snopes receives “grants” from the infamous James Randi Foundation, everything paranormal that happens anywhere and gains a certain amount of witnesses, is “debunked” on Snopes.
Snopes was the first large-scale “fact checking” campaign, but by now there are several others, each of them just as insidious as Snopes. One of them is USA Today. The job of all these “fact checkers” is not to research or provide truth, it’s to advance corporate and government propaganda. Just one (of thousands) of examples:
I don’t care whether Joe Biden looks at his watch, even at a funeral. I wouldn’t even have noticed, if fact-checkers hadn’t made a fuss of it. But he did check his watch and it was witnessed by many. Since fact-checking is not really about facts but about covering up perceived mistakes or misconduct by their sponsors (in this case US Government), they were quick to blast the message across the world through their “news media”, TV, “social media”, radio, etc. Soon the whole world was “informed” that what their eyes were seeing, wasn’t actually true.
In rare cases the lie becomes too obvious and the backlash too loud, the “fact checker” posts a half-hearted retraction, such as in this case:
Here, the “fact checker” went from “it’s not true” to “checked his watch multiple times”. But only after being caught. The rating on this has been changed to “partly false” (which part of it was false?) to “missing context”. What context was missing? The context in which Biden looked at his watch was a ceremony honoring fallen soldiers in Kabul, and was known.
This is only ONE example. It happens almost every day in some form or another. Soon you get a sense of just how toxic and dishonest some of these “journalists” are.
This will keep happening until more people realize that Government controls too much of their “free” press. Do I have to explain why it’s not healthy for Government to control the press? Or why it’s not good to tell people that what they experience with their own senses is not true? We live in a world where a crook can don a white lab-coat and call himself “scientist” and people believe it because he’s wearing a white coat.
Below is one of many memes I’ve posted on my social media, that was censored by a “fact checker”.
There is nothing un-factual about the meme . That’s why the sticker doesn’t say “false”, it says “partly false”. In other words, mostly true! But to be honest – it’s not even “partly” false, it’s 100% true.
Did you know that vaccine-maker Johnson & Johnson funds Facebook “Fact Checking” on Covid? And there I was, wondering why posts on subterranean lizards and blue-skinned Pleiadeans don’t get “fact checked” but vaccine posts do. I found this one out at the website factcheck.org, where it says
Your “fact checking” on pharma is sponsored by pharma. What a mockery of real science!
I’ve only spent a few minutes looking into this and already discovered all of this. It was easy. And there is much more to uncover on these “fact-checkers” who are gaslighting the world.