Snopes doubles down on Babylon Bee attacks, suggesting readers are just ‘too stupid’ to get satire, humor
Weeks after The Babylon Bee obtained legal representation against Snopes, the “fact-checking site” for unfairly labeling their satirical articles as misleading, fake news and biased, Snopes released a new a report on Friday justifying its attack on the popular right-wing satire site by suggesting that their readers are unable to know the difference between fake news and satire.
“Our team of communication researchers has spent years studying misinformation, satire and social media,” the report begins. “Over the last several months, we’ve surveyed Americans’ beliefs about dozens of high-profile political issues. We identified news stories – both true and false – that were being shared widely on social media. We discovered that many of the false stories weren’t the kind that were trying to intentionally deceive their readers; they actually came from satirical sites, and many people seemed to believe them.”
“The truth is, understanding online political satire isn’t easy,” Snopes continued in their post titled “Study: Too Many People Think Satirical News Is Real.”
“Many satirical websites mimic the tone and appearance of news sites. You have to be familiar with the political issue being satirized. You have to understand what normal political rhetoric looks like, and you have to recognize exaggeration. Otherwise, it’s pretty easy to mistake a satirical message for a literal one.”
The Daily Wire covered the news, summarizing that Snopes feels that “Republicans are too stupid to know the difference between fake news and satire.”
“…in an attempt to feign objectivity, Snopes first notes that people have been fooled by The Onion and Stephen Colbert’s caricature of a conservative on The Colbert Report before then sticking the knife straight into The Babylon Bee and twisting it.”
The Snopes analysis is called out by the Daily Wire article: “Snopes’ attempt to appear like an unbiased fact-checker fails in light of the fact that the outlet used its bully power to silence The Babylon Bee and discredit them on multiple occasions, such as when Facebook issued a warning to the satirical site after a ‘False’ rating from Snopes….
“Rather than just simply rate stories from The Babylon Bee as ‘Satire’ or leave them alone for people to discover on their own, Snopes took the fight one step further when it publicly accused The Babylon Bee of using satire as a cover to deliberately spread fake news.
“We’re not sure if fanning the flames of controversy and muddying the details of a news story classify an article as ‘satire,'” Snopes stated in a post that has now been corrected. “The Babylon Bee has managed to fool readers with its brand of satire in the past.”
Mark Zuckerberg is ready to sell out Internet to government control
Fake News Meets Small Business Financing: What Banks Aren’t Telling You
