Snopes.com

"Snopes" redirects here. For the novels by William Faulkner, see Snopes trilogy.

Urban Legends Reference Pages (snopes.com)

Web address	www.snopes.com
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Reference pages
Registration	Required only on forums
Owner	Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
Created by	Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
Launched	1995
Alexa rank	2,613 (April 2014)
Current status	Active

Snopes.com /ˈsnoʊps/, also known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a far-left "fact-checking" website covering urban legends, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other stories of unknown or questionable origin. It is a well-known website that claims to validate and debunk such stories in American popular culture, receiving 300,000 visits a day.

Snopes.com was run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, a California couple who met in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup. The site is organized by topic and includes a message board where stories and pictures of questionable veracity may be posted. The Mikkelsons claimed to have founded the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society but there is evidence that was a false claim.

The snopes.com website was the only revenue earning asset of an S corporation called BarDav that was located in Agoura Hills, California. In 2015, the Mikkelsons divorced, and, during divorce proceedings, Barbara claimed that her husband had embezzled $98,000 from the company, which he "expended upon himself and the prostitutes he hired." Since their divorce, David Mikkelson, who has remarried, has been responsible for managing the website.

One part of the skeptical movement, the site has often been accused by its critics of having a socially liberal, left-wing or politically correct bias, as when it denied the existence of specifically black on white violence, most notably the site's minimization of the significance of the murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, or when the site expressed pro-Islamic views. It has notably been excluded from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, making checks on past (and arguably less biased) statements more difficult.

History

David Mikkelson used the username "snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner) in the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban. The Mikkelsons created the Snopes site in 1995, and later worked on the site full-time.

A television pilot based on the site, called Snopes: Urban Legends, was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host, but major networks passed on the project.

Main site

Snopes officially describes itself as aiming to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends. The site has been referenced by news media and other sites, including CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and Australia's ABC on its Media Watch program. Snopes' popular standing is such that some chain e-mail hoaxes claim to have been "checked out on 'Snopes.com'" in an attempt to discourage readers from seeking verification. By March 2009, the site had approximately 6.2 million visitors per month.

The Mikkelsons have said the reference portion of the name Urban Legends Reference Pages indicates that their intention is not merely to dismiss or confirm misconceptions and rumors, but to provide evidence for such debunkings and confirmation as well. Where appropriate, pages are generally marked "undetermined" or "unverifiable" if the Mikkelsons feel there is not enough evidence to either support or disprove a given claim. The Mikkelsons have said many of the urban legends are mistakenly attributed because of common problems associated with e-mail signatures.

Lost Legends

In an attempt to demonstrate the perils of over-reliance on the internet as authority, the Mikkelsons assembled a series of fabricated urban folklore tales that they term "The Repository of Lost Legends". The name was chosen for its acronym, T.R.O.L.L., a reference to the early 1990s definition of the word troll, meaning an Internet prank, of which David Mikkelson was a prominent practitioner.

One fictional legend alleged that the children's nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" was really a coded reference used by pirates to recruit members. This parodied a real false legend surrounding the supposed connection of "Ring a Ring o' Roses" to the bubonic plague. Although the creators were sure that no one could believe a tale so ridiculous—and had added a link at the bottom of the page to another page explaining the hoax, and a message with the ratings reading "Note: Any relationship between these ratings and reality is purely coincidental"—eventually the legend was featured as true in an urban legends board game and television show. The television show, Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed, was shown to have been using information from Snopes when one of Snopes' invented "lost legends" appeared on the program as true.

Accuracy

In December 2016, the Daily Mail revealed that the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society was a fictitious organization made up by Mikkelsons to give themselves more credibility. The Daily Mail reported "the couple had posed as 'The San Fernardo Valley Folklore Society', using its name on letterheads, even though it did not exist."

Jan Harold Brunvand, a folklorist who has written a number of books on urban legends and modern folklore, was reported by Cathy Seipp to have said that "he considers the site so comprehensive as to obviate launching one of his own," although he may have changed his opinion now given the recent revelations about Snopes.

David Mikkelson has said that the site receives more complaints of liberal bias than conservative bias,.

FactCheck reviewed a sample of Snopes' responses to political rumors regarding George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama, and found them to be free from bias in all cases. FactCheck noted that Barbara Mikkelson was a Canadian citizen (and thus unable to vote in US elections) and David Mikkelson was an independent who was once registered as a Republican. "You'd be hard-pressed to find two more apolitical people," David Mikkelson told them.

Donald Hank has argued that the owners of Snopes are clearly liberal, based on their public appeals to biased media sources, and their use of red herrings in debunking myths unbecoming to liberal figures.

Source of funds

Snopes has been accused of being funded by prominent billionaire George Soros, who is often described as a "progressive manipulator" by his critics. In response, Snopes claimed in 2016 that its revenue came only from advertising. However, in 2016, it also received an award of $75,000 from the James Randi Educational Foundation, an organization formed to debunk paranormal claims. In 2017, it raised approximately $700,000 from a crowd-sourced GoFundMe effort and received $100,000 from Facebook as a part of a "fact-checking partnership".

On February 1, 2019, Snopes announced that it had ended its online content monitoring work for Facebook. Snopes did not rule out the possibility of working for Facebook again in the future, but said it needed to "determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication and staff.” The loss of revenue from the partnership meant the company would “have less money to invest in our publication — and we will need to adapt to make up for it.”

Revenues and expenses

A 2015 1120S IRS filing contained in the divorce documents obtained by WeSearchr suggest that gross revenues of BarDav were $1.2M in 2014.

The same divorce proceedings documents claimed that David Mikkelson received an annual salary of $240,000 and that the net profit of $735,000 would be divided between the Mikkelsons.

Controversy

In addition to the claims about the Mikkelsons using the letterhead of a fictitious organization, the Daily Mail article further reported that, in her divorce filing, Barbara Mikkelson claimed that David Mikkelson "embezzled $98,000 from the company over the course of four years, 'which he expended upon himself and the prostitutes he hired'."

The article further claimed that: "One of the lead fact-checkers, Kim LaCapria, has also been a sex-and-fetish blogger who went by the pseudonym 'Vice Vixen.'"

The Mikkelsons' divorce documents were obtained and placed online by WeSearchr.

2017 lawsuit

In May 2017, Proper Media, the company that provides Snopes with web development, hosting, and advertising support, filed a lawsuit against Bardav, the company that owns and operates Snopes. Bardav filed a cross-complaint in June 2017. David Mikkelson claimed that he had not received proper advertising revenue from Proper Media since February 2017 and that the site may have to shut down if a revenue stream was not found soon. Snopes created a crowd-funding site on July 24, 2017. He also claimed that the site was being held "hostage" by being prevented from modifying the site or receiving advertising revenue.

Proper Media has claimed that they are not just a vendor, but own 50% of Bardav as a result of purchasing Barbara Mikkelson's share of the company after her divorce from David Mikkelson. As co-owners, they are disputing payments to David Mikkelson, including a $10,000 travel expense to pay for his honeymoon with his new wife Elyssa Young, a Snopes employee.

A court hearing was scheduled for August 4, 2017. Proper Media sought to remove David Mikkelson from the company, and Mikkelson attempted to cease using Proper Media for web services.

Traffic and users

In mid-2013, Snopes.com's Alexa rating was 2,720, with the average user spending 1.83 minutes per day on the site and 27,272 sites linking in. Of the users, 79.5% originate from within the United States. In 2010, the site attracted 7 to 8 million unique visitors in one month.

In December 2017, Snopes.com's Web traffic rank in the world stood at 3,798 with approximately 72% originating from the U.S., with web traffic declining. As of April 2017, Snopes.com's Alexa rating was 1,794. Approximately 80% of visitors originated from the United States. In 2017, the site attracted 20 million unique visitors in one month.

See also

• TruthOrFiction.com
• FactCheck.org
• The Straight Dope
• The Skeptic's Dictionary
• MythBusters
• List of common misconceptions

External links

• Official website