Snopes and George Soros: the connection

FINAL UPDATE, APRIL 15, 2024

See the update at the end of this article for my final word on Snopes.

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

Shall I make it simple? There is no connection.

Not simple enough? Okay, how about this: There is no connection between George Soros and Snopes.com.

Still too complicated? Okay, then try this on for size: If you believe that Snopes.com is financed by George Soros or anybody else, then YOU ARE AN IDIOT.

Sometimes I am amazed at how easily and thoughtlessly people pass on falsehoods whose only purpose is to sully the reputation of an honorable or successful person (or group of people). We used to call it gossip, now we call it email lore. (And sometimes we call it political discourse.)

I received one of those endlessly forwarded emails tonight, asserting breathlessly and longwindedly (can you be"breathless" and "longwinded" at the same time? and is "longwindedly" a real adverb?) that the Snopes.com website is financed by shady left-wing sources, that most of those sources have tried to hide their identities, and that one of the sources is controversial kazillionaire George Soros.

I sure get tired of this crap.

Emails like this are written in such a way as to get you outraged enough to feel a moral obligation to "forward this message to everyone you know." They often appeal, in the final paragraph, to your sense of dignity, patriotism, or just-plain-guilt. If they succeed, then, prompted by both outrage and the guilt, you will forward it to everybody in your Address Book.

Don't you wish you'd stopped to do some fact-checking first?

In the case of snopes.com, I know the Snopeses. David and Barbara Mikkelson are personal friends of mine. We were chasing urban folklore together back before Web browsers existed, back when we had to crawl through the untamed wilds of the Internet with nothing but a machete and a keyboard (and I carried an axe), relying on text-based tools like archie and UseNet newsreaders. We were stuffing and mounting urban legends before any of you found your first free AOL CD in your mailbox.

I watched as David and Barbara put things in place so that they could have a go at making money from urban folklore, by carefully detaching themselves from alt.folklore.urban and starting, maybe not the first, but definitely the most successful, commercial urban-folklore website, Snopes.com.

David and Barbara could not be successful if they didn't remain detached and independent—unencumbered by financial or political relationships with ANYBODY. I mean, duh.

But don't take my word for it. Read what they themselves have to say about it:
http://www.snopes.com/info/aboutus.asp
and http://www.snopes.com/info/faq.asp
If that's not good enough for you, then read what two other professional folklorists have to say about it:
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/s/snopes.htm
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/internet/a/snopes_exposed.htm

You can call the Mikkelsons liars if you want. You can call me, Rich Buhler (TruthOrFiction) and Dave Emery (About) deluded if you want. But at least we went to the trouble of searching out the truth. We're not stupid enough to believe something just because it landed in our Inboxes.

Besides, like I said, I know the Snopeses. Personally. Do you?

UPDATE, June 14: Here's another analysis of the question, written in April 2009 by Viveca Novak at FactCheck.org. For those of you not familiar with FactCheck.org, it's a highly regarded website, billing itself as "a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center." You can accuse them of political bias if you want (Hey! Did you know that the Annenberg Foundation gives financial support to National Public Radio? Does that make them liberals?), but their work has always been credible, well-researched and impartial, as far as I can tell.

UPDATE, April 15, 2024: The years have not been good to Snopes. Everything I said in this article was true, back in 2012. And, in case you're wondering, Snopes is still not funded by George Soros. But Snopes today is nothing like Snopes back then. A lot has happened, mostly bad. Neither David nor Barbara are associated with Snopes today, and other fact-checking websites have picked up the torch which Snopes so clumsily dropped. For more information, see Chantel Tattoli's article at Fast Company, "Inside Snopes: the rise, fall, and rebirth of an internet icon."