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Snopes Digest
18 February 2020 • Issue #4

1 Savage Memes, Lunar Dreams
   What do Charlie Sheen, scammy hook-up sites, and a space start-up
   have in common?

2 Behind the Snopes
   How Snopes investigations can affect the feeds of our journalists.

3 In Case You Missed It
   The most popular and most important stories on Snopes.com lately.

4 Snopes-worthy Reads
   Good stories we’ve shared amongst ourselves recently.

Issue #4 edited by Brandon Echter and Bond Huberman.

1. Savage Memes, Lunar Dreams
Last week, Snopes published the results of a two-year
investigation that links a network of shady dating websites

designed to trap users in recurring subscription charges to the
    start-up Firefly Aerospace.

    Improbably, the initial tip that launched this story — spotted by
    Snopes General Manager Vinny Green (read more about that
    below) — came from the Facebook pages of celebrities like
    Cheech and Chong, Snoop Dogg, Charlie Sheen, and Bow Wow.
    These celebrity profiles promoted lewd, misogynistic, and
    sometimes pornographic memes that directed users to sign-up
    pages for fake hook-up sites, which then pushed people to a
    network of over 200 “niche dating websites” that operate with the
    same aggressive subscription tactics and use stolen images to
    compel users to join. These practices, a former Federal Trade
    Commission investigator told us, may be in violation of U.S. law.

    Who ultimately profits from this activity? The evidence suggests an
    elaborate effort was made to conceal ownership details of these
    dating websites. But using court documents, public business
    filings, and internet forensics, Senior Writer Alex Kasprak
    untangled a labyrinthine network of off-shore holding companies.

    Read the full investigation here.

Snopes-tionary
Speak like an insider! Each newsletter, we’ll explain a term or piece of fact-
checking lingo that we use on the Snopes team.

Memevertisements: A portmanteau of “meme” and
“advertisements.” Used by our investigative reporters (aka The
Dive Team) to reference entertaining, eye-catching, and sometimes
NSFW social media posts that not-so-subtly advertise dubious
products order to turn a profit off unsuspecting users’
engagement.

2. Behind The Snopes
Let’s talk about what’s going on with Snopes: the newsroom, the
products, the people, and everything and anything that makes
Snopes, Snopes. This week Vinny Green, the general manager of
Snopes, explains how investigations can affect our social media
experiences.

My Facebook feed is sick. It’s got an infection of sorts. The
symptoms started a few years ago when I began following certain
celebrities who had a habit of sharing very suspicious links to
clickbait and fake news. I tipped off the Snopes team and we
started digging.

Reporter Bethania Palma and I tracked down 29 fake domains
that post to verified celebrity pages and published our findings.
But within a few months, some celebrity pages found a new tactic
for hoodwinking their fans: memevertising.

Soon, Senior Writer Alex Kasprak was on the case. We were down
    the rabbit hole, one that would take us into the dark underbelly of
    affiliate advertising. The Snopes team sacrifices our own profiles
    and news feeds — following disreputable and disheartening
    content producers — so we can try to bust misinformation before it
    reaches you. Two major Snopes investigations have resulted from
    this. Imagine what we could accomplish when all of you are
    helping us. Send us tips here.

    And in case you were wondering — no, my feed has not yet
    recovered.

    Next time, you’ll hear from another member of the Snopes team
    about a unique aspect of working here that you might find
    interesting. Do you want us to cover something specific? Write to
    us here!

Web Developer Wanted
We’re looking for a talented web developer to help us build the Snopes of
the future! Apply or share with anyone who might be interested.

  Read the Job Description

3. In Case You Missed It
The latest news and fact checks on Snopes.com.

  The new coronavirus outbreak continues to spread and raise
  international concerns. It has also given rise to countless false
  rumors, some pernicious and others laughable. The claim that
  the outbreak was predicted by name in an old episode of “The
  Simpsons” fell into the latter category.

  In a theatrical coda to U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of
  the Union address earlier this month, Speaker of the House
  Nancy Pelosi tore a copy of the speech in half, leading Trump
  supporters to call for her to be prosecuted for the destruction of
  government property. Did she do anything illegal? Snopes
  looked at what legal experts have to say on the matter.

  Rumors about the 2020 U.S. presidential election have
  continued apace. Last week, for example, Snopes received a
  flurry of requests to authenticate a newspaper clipping
  purporting that Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg
  was arrested as a teenager for animal abuse. Our investigation
  led us straight to a run-of-the-mill “fake news generator”
  website.

  Another Snopes investigation was prompted by news reports
  claiming construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall endangers
  a Native American burial site in Arizona. Tribal leaders and
  archaeologists say Monument Hill, part of the Organ Pipe
  Cactus National Monument, is indeed the location of such a
  burial site, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed
  that controlled blasting was being done in the area to prepare
  for construction.

  If you know who “Uncle Don” was, raise your hand. Folks of a
  certain age will at least recall hearing stories about the

legendary kids’ radio show host, whose broadcasts ran from the
        late 1920s through the late 1940s. Supposedly, Uncle Don was
        caught on a live mic at the end of one show saying, “There, that
        oughta hold the little bastards!” Did he actually make the
        infamous remark? Read on...

     Have a story tip? Send it here!

Snopesing 101
Fact-check like a pro! Every newsletter, we’ll let you peek behind the curtain and see
some of the ways we check shady information so you can check dubious claims
yourself.

Wonder how we uncovered Max Polyakov’s tangled web of financial
holdings? Much of that information came from now-public records like the
Paradise Papers, the leaked trove of documents that reveal shell
corporations and tax havens of the global elite.

We were able to search this by using the Offshore Leak Database from the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). It combines four
recent data drops — the Paradise Papers, the Panama Papers, the
Offshore Leaks, and the Bahamas Leaks — into one searchable set.

Journalists go to great lengths to expose injustice and empower others to
discover the truth for themselves. A whistleblower provided German
journalist Bastian Obermayer with the over 10 million documents that

would later be known as the Panama Papers. With the help of the ICIJ,
groundbreaking investigations from the documents forced resignations
around the globe. Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist who led
investigations into the Panama Papers, was assassinated in a car bombing
in October 2017.

Search the data yourself here. It’s an excellent example of how you can
leverage public databases to find the next thread you need to pull.

    4. Snopes-worthy Reads
    What Team Snopes is reading across the web.

    How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail
    Michael Shermer, Scientific American

    On Facebook, Anti-Vaxxers Urged a Mom Not to Give Her Son
    Tamiflu. He Later Died.
    Brandy Zadrozny, NBC News

    A Website Wanted to Restore Trust in the Media. It’s Actually a
    Political Operation
    Gabby Deutch, Washington Post Opinion

    Fox News Internal Document Bashes Pro-Trump Fox Regulars
    for Spreading ‘Disinformation’
    Will Sommer, Maxwell Tani and Andrew Kirell, The Daily Beast

    How to Stop the Spread of Fake News? Pause for a Moment
    Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

    The Original Renegade
    Taylor Lorenz, The New York Times

    Have any recommended reads? Submit them here.

The Pets of Snopes
It’s true: The Snopes “team” was once just two people and a cat. Twenty-
five years later, we have more humans and more cats (and even some dogs)
than at our once-humble beginnings. We want you to meet our furry, fact-
finding friends because, well, who doesn’t love a cute animal picture?

This week, meet Managing Editor Do’s crows! She writes:

“My husband and I noticed when we moved into our current home that a
couple of crows liked to hang out all day in our backyard. We began
feeding them and, lo-and-behold, they started having babies, a new mating
pair hanging out every year. This extended family always seems to be
within earshot of each other. When I go on walks around the neighborhood,
one will sound the ‘Caw!’ alarm (“Food lady on the move!”) before a cloud
of crows forms overhead, with the birds silently swooping down from wires
to snatch the nuts I’ve tossed on the ground, and then back up to quietly
wait for more. The little neighbor boy across the street christened me
‘Crow-Crow Do-Do.’ I think it fits just fine.”

We hope you enjoyed this edition of the Snopes Digest. We’ll be
releasing them every two weeks, so please add this email address
to your white list and keep an eye out on March 3 for the next
issue.

You can read the previous issue here.

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