Welcome to the NZ Skeptics newsletter.
This week there's been a scandal over at the Snopes website. I get my COVID vaccine and we hear more about the situation we're in with climate change.
Wishing you a good week - stay skeptical and keep promoting science!
I'm sure you've come across the fact-checking website Snopes. It's a popular, and generally quick way to check some internet rumour or news story for its veracity.
David Mikkelson is a co-founder of the website. It's emerged, through a Buzzfeed investigation, that Mikkelson who used to write articles for the site plagiarised various other news sites for stories, often copying their text wholesale, or at least paragraphs. The contributed articles ran between 2015 and 2019.
Mikkelson also contributed articles under a pseudonym - Jeff Zarronandia, a practise frowned upon in journalistic circles. He claimed that using a pseudonym was for protection from people who didn't like the results of the fact checks.
Now I have no journalistic training, but I know that you can't just copy and paste text without attribution and get away with it. And apparently Mikkelson knew that too - he's quoted as explaining “You can always take an existing article and rewrite it just enough to avoid copyright infringement.” The practise was to just copy and paste the whole text of a news article then go back and change various wording enough to avoid charges of plagiarism. That does seem like a fairly simplistic and dodgy approach.
So, to be clear, Snopes is still doing good work checking facts and being a source of information for shutting down hoaxes. But as always it's best to check multiple sources, and attempt to locate the primary source where possible.
It is unfortunate that the scandal with Mikkelson will tar Snopes with that same brush. At least in the minds of simplistic thinkers, Snopes is no longer to be trusted. You can expect to have the scandal brought up if you choose to use Snopes as a source for whether something is true or not.
The current writers at Snopes have issued a statement about the plagiarism. It's sad that they are affected by the unwise and unethical actions of one of their site's founders.
