Does Snopes.com have a political lean

MyNameIsCharlie | Mythic Inconceivable!
 
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I've read a few articles lately that state Snopes is nothing more than a leftist attack on the right. The creators claim they are apolitical and stress that all sources are cited.

Your thoughts?
Last Edit: January 10, 2016, 08:05:13 PM by MyNameIsCharlie


 
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This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
Snopes seems pretty unbiased to me, although I'm not a regular reader.


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No, but they're not exactly qualified investigative journalists.


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Blatantly so. The video in question is twenty minutes long yet the debunking mentions almost nothing of it, and instead focuses on trying to discredit anyone that doesn't want Europe to be flooded with non-Europeans.


 
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What articles were you reading?


Anonymous (User Deleted) | Legendary Invincible!
 
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Blatantly so. The video in question is twenty minutes long yet the debunking mentions almost nothing of it, and instead focuses on trying to discredit anyone that doesn't want Europe to be flooded with non-Europeans.
Did you even read the article?
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The Video

There was a clear agenda behind the "With Gates Wide Open" video. While some real footage of Muslim refugees is used, several deceptive practices were employed in the editing of the film. For instance, many of the individual shots used in the film appear on screen for only a few brief moments, which makes it difficult to determine the contexts of those scenes.

Take the clip shown at the 7:43 mark, for example. The audio comes from a man talking about how he is afraid to walk down the street due to the growing refugee population, while the visual shows someone being attacked. In the context of the video it is reasonable to assume that the man is being attacked by refugees, but that is not the case. Instead of showing refugees attacking an innocent civilian, the clip actually shows two Slovakian migrant workers who were attacked by leftist activist in Stockholm:
migrant workers height=366

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Similarly, a clip at the 7:51 mark that is played as the narrator talks about "crime skyrocketing" has nothing to do with refugees. The clip comes from a 2013 incident in which soccer fans rioted following Paris Saint-Germain's first French league title in 19 years.

The  video also uses previously debunked footage purportedly showing Muslims on a train in Germany in 2015. That piece of footage actually came from France and was first uploaded to YouTube in 2010, before the current Syrian refugee crisis began:

YouTube

The "With Gates Wide Open" video features glimpses of violence in cities across the world. While the video is edited to make it seem as though all of the incidents involve refugees in Europe, that is simply not the case.
Last Edit: January 11, 2016, 02:22:39 PM by Kupoop


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Did you even watch the video? Pay attention to how the snopes article deliberately ignores almost all of it. It's 20 minute and snopes can only point out three, and yet it claims it's somehow debunked the entire thing.

Hell did you even read the article? It's almost entirely about /pol/ and not the content of the video.


Anonymous (User Deleted) | Legendary Invincible!
 
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Did you even watch the video? Pay attention to how the snopes article deliberately ignores almost all of it. It's 20 minute and snopes can only point out three, and yet it claims it's somehow debunked the entire thing.

Hell did you even read the article? It's almost entirely about /pol/ and not the content of the video.
It's a Snopes article, not a scientific report. Debunking most of a 20-minute video of bullshit would take more time than the director probably put into it.

More importantly, the video should make the effort to prove that its claims are true, not the other way around.


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I didn't even know snopes had a news section


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Did you even watch the video? Pay attention to how the snopes article deliberately ignores almost all of it. It's 20 minute and snopes can only point out three, and yet it claims it's somehow debunked the entire thing.

Hell did you even read the article? It's almost entirely about /pol/ and not the content of the video.
It's a Snopes article, not a scientific report. Debunking most of a 20-minute video of bullshit would take more time than the director probably put into it.
That's awfully convenient that snopes doesn't have to be held to any standards, and you've got no grounds to claim that the entirety of the video is bullshit.
Quote

More importantly, the video should make the effort to prove that its claims are true, not the other way around.
The video doesn't make any claims though, it's literally a compilation of videos of events that happened. And again, isn't the entire point of a debunking article to do exactly that, to disprove things?


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That's awfully convenient that snopes doesn't have to be held to any standards,
I never said anything of the sort.
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and you've got no grounds to claim that the entirety of the video is bullshit.
Excuse me, didn't you just accuse an entire Snopes article of being bullshit?

Hey, I'm not the one claiming that refugees are violent. I don't have to prove anything, and I'm sure as hell not going to waste hours of my life debunking 20 minutes of Facebook clickbait. Considering it's from the Internet (8chan), anything it claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
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The video doesn't make any claims though, it's literally a compilation of videos of events that happened.
The very title of the article snopes debunks is "This Is The Most Disturbing Muslim 'Refugee' Video You Will Ever See." The official title is "With Gates Wide Open." It literally makes the claim that Muslim refugees are committing all of these acts.


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That's awfully convenient that snopes doesn't have to be held to any standards,
I never said anything of the sort.
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It's a Snopes article, not a scientific report.
You're quite clearly implying that they only have to be held to the standard of a snopes article, which is bullshit.
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Excuse me, didn't you just accuse an entire Snopes article of being bullshit?
What's your point? It's a very short article and the part that attempts to debunk the video is even shorter
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Hey, I'm not the one claiming that refugees are violent. I don't have to prove anything, and I'm sure as hell not going to waste hours of my life debunking 20 minutes of Facebook clickbait. Considering it's from the Internet (8chan), anything it claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
That's the entire point of this discussion, snopes and you are claiming the whole thing's bullshit without doing anything to back that claim up.
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Quote
The video doesn't make any claims though, it's literally a compilation of videos of events that happened.
The very title of the article snopes debunks is "This Is The Most Disturbing Muslim 'Refugee' Video You Will Ever See." The official title is "With Gates Wide Open." It literally makes the claim that Muslim refugees are committing all of these acts.
Wrong, the video is also about Muslims already living in European countries, which you or snopes would only know about if you actually watched the video.
Last Edit: January 12, 2016, 09:35:46 PM by Cadenza


Anonymous (User Deleted) | Legendary Invincible!
 
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You're quite clearly implying that they only have to be held to the standard of a snopes article, which is bullshit.
Viral videos should be generally taken with a grain of salt. Even if the basic claims may have be valid, there can a ton of ways to exaggerate the claims, and it's usually not worth the effort to debunk it. See below.

You're also judging the entirety of the website on one article by one author. It doesn't account for more fact-based articles like this or this or this. Snopes has often been accused of political bias, but these claims are shaky at best.

Because snopes didn't move heaven and earth to debunk a barrage of alleged migrant clips doesn't mean that there's bias to be found. Given that the video is viral and not, like, being picked up by the mainstream media likely means that snopes simply didn't care to put in a major effort. They could, but the early evidence (and your own lack of), plus their reluctance to actually put a true/false icon like their other articles, seems to indicate they're being reasonably fair with the little amount of effort put into it compared to their other articles.
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What's your point? It's a very short article and the part that attempts to debunk the video is even shorter
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That's the entire point of this discussion, snopes and you are claiming the whole thing's bullshit without doing anything to back that claim up.
Snopes already made a few points. But my point is also about the bigger problem with debunking the video:


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The video doesn't make any claims though, it's literally a compilation of videos of events that happened.
You'd have to be mentally incompetent to reach that conclusion after watching the video.
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Wrong, the video is also about Muslims already living in European countries, which you or snopes would only know about if you actually watched the video.
"With Open Gates"

That title heavily implies refugees.

18 seconds into the video:

"Germany is facing a drastic number of refugees"

45 seconds:

"...migrants who had already been flooding into Europe for decades"
Last Edit: January 19, 2016, 03:56:39 PM by Kupoop


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Viral videos should be generally taken with a grain of salt. Even if the basic claims may have be valid, there can a ton of ways to exaggerate the claims, and it's usually not worth the effort to debunk it. See below.
Again that's exactly my point, it would take time and effort to come through the video and attempt to debunk it which, is what they would do if they weren't biased.

But instead they make a tiny article that hardly even mentions the video and instead focuses on the surrounding politics, and then they have the balls to claim that they've debunked the entire thing. And then people like you are somehow convinced that they've so thoroughly debunked it that it's not even worth watching the video in question, "because it's obviously bullshit just look at the snopes article!". That's fucking political maneuvering on snopes part.

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You're also judging the entirety of the website on one article by one author. It doesn't account for more fact-based articles like this or this or this. Snopes has often been accused of political bias, but these claims are shaky at best.
Your factcheck article is seven years out of date. Likewise political bias doesn't imply that they have to be blatant about it every chance they get; I used to read ars technia for a few years but I dropped them entirely over a feminist article, it's the same tactic here, hide the bias under credibility.

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Because snopes didn't move heaven and earth to debunk a barrage of alleged migrant clips doesn't mean that there's bias to be found. Given that the video is viral and not, like, being picked up by the mainstream media likely means that snopes simply didn't care to put in a major effort. They could, but the early evidence (and your own lack of), plus their reluctance to actually put a true/false icon like their other articles, seems to indicate they're being reasonably fair with the little amount of effort put into it compared to their other articles.
Are you even reading my posts? They didn't put any effort into debunking so they have no justification to claim that they've debunked it and you have no justification to claim that they don't need to.

And that's the point I brought up this article, why would they claim to debunk something yet not put any effort into doing so? political bias.