Anatomy of a False Snopes Debunking

Today I was happy to discover a textbook Google/Snopes false debunking, yet also with some interesting new elaborations that made it worth a deeper dive.  I thought I might share this investigation with everybody, in the hope that by shedding sunlight on the mischief being done by Google, Snopes and “whoever”, it might someday end.

Today’s Snopes travesty was also rather timely, being in defense of CNN, after what may be the beginning of the first true legal victory against CNN’s “fake news”.  It’s like a virologist finding a new virus, and one which just happens causing a current epidemic.  While it may not be true schadenfreude, it certainly is a kind of “pest happiness”.

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OK.  We’re three paragraphs in, and I’m still not telling you why Snopes is bad.

ONE MIGHT ASK (to put a Hillary spin on it) why I’m not just getting to the point.

Ah.

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THAT.

Impatience to just get to the heart of the matter.

Is.

The fundamental psychological primitive.

Behind what Snopes does.

And how it works.

Betraying both who is behind it.

And how to defeat it. 

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I hope that was incredibly clear.  If not, please go back, slow down, and read it again.

My recognition of that unifying point, due to insight from reader comments below, made an edit to add it absolutely necessary.

You see, Snopes preys on our desire to fact-check, when we don’t really have time to do it, and turns our desire for truth into a WEAKNESS.

All the more evil because THEY and THEIR BACKERS created the massive disinformation that created the doubt.

Thus, what you are going to see here, is a very slow and methodical analysis of how we use Snopes.  And it is that very slowness and method which will expose what is going on.

 

So where was I?

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I wanted to preserve this record of Snopes’ misdeeds forever, as well as to give people insight into how Snopes operates.  As a scientist from the BCC era (before climate change), where truth in skepticism was the cover charge just to get in the door, I place Snopes’ kind of false debunking somewhere in the region of serial killing and genocide.  This is important to me.  It’s like turning in Ted Bundy after he’s gotten away with it for dozens of bodies.  Gotta do it.

And speaking of Teds, sorry, Ted Turner. You should have never hooked up with that devious bitch.  If you hadn’t, this post would have never been necessary.

I have studied Snopes’ methodology for quite some time, and can say that they use a variety of techniques, including new ones exposed in this post.  However, their main one is a kind of deceptive construction and debunking of strawman analogs of the actual story they allege to debunk, thereby delivering a misleading or false debunk of the “true” story.

You can’t perform a 180-degree turn in the information superhighway very easily.  But a series of smaller-angled turns, using the breakdown lanes, exit ramps, and median crossovers, works nicely.

However, this time, if you slow things down and watch the fail,  Snopes is attempting to spin out out of a horrible, (cue voice of Trump) TERRIBLE smack-down of CNN.  And when you slow down, you see that it doesn’t really work.  It’s just hilariously wonderful to read the accompanying “bunking” that undoes their “debunking”.  I don’t think they’re out to win this one, people – just damage control.

OMG.  I almost feel sorry for these intellectual criminals.

Good God, Google.  How in the hell did you guys get talked into this madness?  Your reputation is worth more than half of Alphabet’s catalog of research!  Maybe all of it!

COME TO JESUS, LARRY AND SERGEY! COME TO JESUS!

Anyway, here we go.

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Here is the tweet that I saw in my stream today:

So, I go click on the story, here.  I wanted to see the details.

Now, the problem is, this site isn’t one I’ve been to in ages, if at all, and it’s unfamiliar.  In some ways, it CONFORMS to the outward appearance of real “fake news” sites that are deployed by the Hillary/Obama/Merkel/Lenin Deep State Media (alias, the CIA), which are filled with either malware per se, or with auto-jump links to more plausibly deniable malware sites.  An example of the latter, which I ran into today, is this one:

http://departedmedia(dot)com/starbucks-just-placed-trumps-photo-floor-every-customer-step/

Don’t repair and go to that link – it’s highly poisonous, unless Deep State shut it down already.  But researchers are welcome to give them hell.

Anyway, because I thought this might be real fake news, and not pseudo fake news, I decided to verify it.  AH.  That turned out to be very educational.

I typed – in ALL CAPS (because of a different rant, and being too lazy to hit one key, and also knowing that capitalization doesn’t affect most searches) – the following key words from the article, into my browser’s entry field, set to search using Google:

ORINDA EVANS JUDGE CNN HOSPITAL

So far, so good.  Oddly, I think I saw, in the Google auto-completions being offered to me, the word “snopes”.

Not a good sign for truth in the media, after you see what happens next.

Oh, My Goodness!  Snopes has risen to the top!  At this point, if you’re an honest IT person like me, you now know two things.

The first thing you realize is that a lot of people are checking Snopes on this story, OR Google is FAKING, PRETENDING, and TILTING THE GAME to make sure that people think people ARE going to Snopes.  Or perhaps Google simply doesn’t care what you think, and just wants you to go to Snopes.  Because we know that Google would NEVER monkey dishonestly with the auto-complete.  Right?

The second thing you realize is that Google thinks you should go to Snopes, and have created a nice big box for Snopes above everything else.  Now it’s important not to gloss over that.  Many people, especially those inclined to believe that anything which gets rounded up on Snopes is “fake news”, are simply going to give up their investigation right there, and assume it really is “fake news”.  In fact, I will allege that Google probably has NUMBERS on how many people will give up further investigation.  Numbers that looked good enough to those shifty Googlers to actually move “forward” doing this.

And just as an aside, regarding that humble, honest IT person who was tasked with actually getting those numbers, on orders from some PC Obamabot Googler who was asked to produce the numbers, so that they could move the data upstairs through an increasingly dishonest chain of management.  The fact that this honest IT person was NOT the person who actually handed over the data to the person who decided that this whole Snopes scheme should move forward, and was therefore unable to caution them how unethical this whole enterprise would become – well, there you go.  There is a certain very fundamental law of information that these folks are either willfully ignoring or don’t yet know, but I can tell you this.  Donald Trump knows it.  He may not know what to call it, but he knows it.  Because he would never make this mistake.

This is why the sordid tech industry I often refer to as “I.T. Farben” is now helping commit vericide all over the plucking fanet.  Excuse my French.

Anyway, back to the image.  Below “SNOPES” – with the words “FACT CHECK” shining brightly at you dumb hicks in glowing neon roadside bar lights – you will see three sub-images pointing to actual stories about the case.  Those turn out to be hilarious, but we’ll return to those in a moment.

Let’s go to “WOE IS UPON THEE, CONSERVATIVES” Snopes.

I had to shift the page up in the browser a little bit so you could see the important stuff, meaning I scrolled an inch or two of ads off the top, but otherwise, this is an actual screenshot of what you see at the top of the Snopes page.  Note that they’ve created a nice, pleasing, CIA-approved “trust-inducing” image of the CNN header, and immediately below that, the rating of “mostly false”.  We’re done!  Right?  This is EXACTLY how I read the page.  And remember – a HUGE percentage of “investigators” are DONE at this point.

Well, wait a second.  What was “mostly false”?

AHA!

Jump back up!  In fact, this now serves as a WONDERFUL demonstration of the psychology of what CIA/Google/Snopes is doing here.  You see, I just realized that ME, MYSELF & I had a “false memory” of the title.  I thought it was “roughly” what I was looking for.  That the story I had read elsewhere was what was being debunked.

BZZZZZZ!  You just got “snopesed”!  And your trust in Google and honest IT helped!

The actual Snopes page title is:

Did a Judge Rule that CNN is ‘Fake News’?

Well, let’s think about that.  Is there any way on Earth that a judge is going to “rule” that something is “fake news”?

I mean, really.  What do they take us for?  Of course not.

The title premise, a very clever DISTORTION of the article that likely brought you here, isn’t just false – it’s patently false.

So now, given a strawman ridiculously exceeding the truth, “mostly false” actually makes sense.  It even seems “reasonable”.

I want to DRILL IN that point.  Snopes is arguing by THEIR pedantic analysis of THEIR distortion of OUR literary headline based on REAL facts, in order to IMPLY that THOSE facts are FALSE, and more importantly that YOUR interpretation of those facts is wrong.

More specifically, in the other direction.

Snopes is:

(1) taking YOUR poetic criticism of CNN (“fake news”, which is even their side’s term, ironically, flipped back in another media fail),

(2) abusing it into a new headline which freezes the poetry in a rather Alinsky fashion, and

(3) returning a nearly binary “truth index” based on their pedantic, literal analysis of their own distorted headline.

Three 60’s make a 180.

Their goal isn’t so much to disprove the facts, as to CHANGE YOUR INTERPRETATION.

Now – I could easily continue, and go into the depth of the Snopes page and argue, point-by-point.  And I’m sure that – to my own satisfaction, I would “win”.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT SNOPES WANTS YOU TO DO.

Go ahead and read the rest of the Snopes page, if you’ve never read one.  I characterize it as “information as disinformation”.  You will get tired of it very quickly.  It’s a kind of intellectual trolling.

You may think it’s intellectually dishonest for me not to go into the specifics of this case, as chosen by Snopes, to try to “disprove” them.  You may think that I’m running from the fight.  But I am going to do something very sneaky.  I’m not going to argue the other side, either.  You’ll see in a moment.

This is classic Snopes.  Set up an adjacent strawman, and have at it with gusto.  Of course, this is not how you win a real, honest debate.  It’s how you win a war, a coup, or whatever else the CIA does when it’s not generating fake news.

Skip Snopes.  Don’t even go there.

DON’T LET THEM PUT DISINFORMATION INTO YOUR BRAIN.

Instead, go to any of the three sites mentioned right below the “Snopes box”.  Ironically, the ones Google USED to put at the top, before they got pushed into pushing Snopes.

I think they had a motto like “Don’t be evil” back then.

Or – and this is always good advice when dealing with Google – go to something further down the list that you understand, and with which you feel comfortable.  I, personally, TRUST your brain, your ethics, and your common sense.  I don’t HAVE to tell you how to spot Truth.  You elected Donald “death to fake news” Trump, for G_d’s sake.  You know what in the heck to do.

Now – the place that *I* went to first was this link, at the specialist site Law_Newz.  I have used them before, and they often have the original documents.  They did NOT disappoint me this time, either.  You can get a wonderful PDF or TXT version of the judge’s order.

Now.  Look at that title.  On the place.  That has.  The actual order.  From the judge.

To quote the lovable yet horribly, TERRIBLY hypocritical George Takei, “Oh, my.”

Let’s look at that title again.  How much better than Snopes can you get?

Hospital CEO Wins Major Court Victory After Accusing CNN of False Reporting

I’m sorry, but I’m just LMAO at this point.

Because – really, when you think about it – being accused of “FALSE REPORTING”, and more so losing the first skirmish in a legal battle over it, and then having a judge “not mince words” about it – it is all so much more damning than the now-rather-laughable accusations of “FAKE NEWS”, that I simply have to remark at the malevolent genius of Snopes.  To choose a “less damning” diversion for their strawman, rather than a “more damning” one, as is their usual habit – well, Snopes simply outdid themselves here.

So anyway, if you missed the link, I strongly urge that you go to the following site, and actually get the PDF of the judge’s order.  Or just read it in the page in the Scribd widget.

http://lawnewz.com/uncategorized/hospital-ceo-wins-major-court-ruling-after-accusing-cnn-of-false-reporting/

The bottom line is that the story is wonderfully true, the reporting is good, all the way from the judge’s lips to the tweet.

And don’t take it on my authority.  Read it for yourself.

See?  I told you I would be fair.

And this is a very important point.  STAY OUT OF THE WEEDS.  Snopes, and the people behind Snopes, want you IN those weeds, so they can turn you around.  Simply get the facts, and learn them.  You will be light-years ahead of the leftist masses that are being dumbed down by their own masters, for some inscrutable reason.

HAT TIP TO SUNDANCE.

AND ON THE SUBJECT OF THE TWEET.  WELL, WELL, WELL…….

Let’s scroll down below, and see what appeared there, shortly after it was posted!

How interesting!  It’s almost like there were people who made sure that this not-so-nice story about CNN got “snopesed” very quickly!  So who did it?

Followed by Barack Obama!  Now THAT is interesting!  Let’s look more closely!

And that avatar is really interesting!  Is it the guy, the gal, or neither?

At this point, my money is on neither.  A quick look at the Twitter timeline, filled with a lot of oddly satanic and old-school light-in-the-loafers stuff, says these are not the Obamabots we’re looking for.  I’m not sure – the people in the picture could even be HOLLYWOOD CELEBRITIES or FAMOUS ACTORS, like the ones who told us not to vote for Donald Trump, and – sadly – I wouldn’t know it.  Because I got rid of FAKE CABLE, and suddenly became smarter than most journalists.

In fact, I don’t even think Oakland is where these people are from, but who knows.

I DON’T GET IN THE WEEDS.

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So there you have it.  Another debunking debunked.  First CNN, then Snopes, and finally Google.  Maybe add in CTR and Barack Obama.  Liars all, the dominoes fall.

Who’s smiling now?

-Wolf Moon, AP (Actual Press), © 2017