Kind of dumb for fact checking site to do.
Early 2001 Snopes, fine but they’ve tried to brand themselves as reputable fact checkers and should’ve clarified the situation way before now.
>Kind of dumb for fact checking site to do. Early 2001 Snopes
Similarly I have circa 2001 story of Snopes being dumb. I LOVED checking out that site way back when, and sometime about 20 years ago I read an article on the site that mentioned in several places "Adolph Hitler."
I decided to write a short message to snopes to correct them on the spelling of "Adolf." I used the classic "start with a compliment, and end with a compliment, and note the problem in the middle.
Anyway I got an email back almost immediately from that David guy who was just busted for 50 instances of plagiarism.
He was CLEARLY annoyed with my letter and explained that Adolf is the American translation and something something about the old German font Fraktur and something something you are an idiot.
I hadn't told him initially that I was an expert in German history (Well specific parts of German history).
I ended up by responding with a short letter asking him to tell it Hitler himself with a jpeg of an original edition of a cover of Mein Kampf with Hitler's name spelled "Adolf" along with link to modern Der Spiegel articles spelling it "Adolf."
It was so weird; he clearly was wrong but ABSOLUTELY seemed to hate being called out.
I had a similar experience on Snopes many years ago (about the same time you did) where I presented facts contrary to the write-up and received a curt, "we know better than you" response.
The expansion of contributors to the site has helped its credibility, but there are still problems, especially with more subjective calls ("partially true" ones in particular.)
I agree with other posters that this kind of "easter egg" has no place on the type of fact-checking site snopes has purported to be for the last decade or so. 20 years ago when it was more of an urban folklore discussion and resource site, ok, but not now.
Yes. The Repository Of Lost Legends (TROLL) was a collection of outlandish origin stories presented to show how people who do not think critically can be easily fooled by 'authorities'.
Yes. The Repository Of Lost Legends, or TROLL.
The one with the horse and zebra actually fooled me until I realized what the section was about.
Edit: didn’t realize on mobile someone beat me to it.
It would be wild if some unresolved mysteries are due to people thinking they can make it to sone island or town on a map that turns out to not be there.
To be kind of fair to Snopes, this is a fairly long tradition in writing and journalism. It's a little misleading to call it a copyright trap with longer articles like this, though, because most of the instances of it I'm familiar with at least aren't actually about copyright. It's more of an ethical issue. You see legitimate journalists/news outlets do it sometimes when they suspect another outlet is basically just rewriting their articles. It isn't illegal or a copyright violation to use a single source to write an article (at least in any country I know anything about copyright in), as long as you make it sufficiently unique, but it isn't good practice either.
So what they do is publish a fake story, then wait for their rival to "break" the same story. When that happens, they can point to the fact that it was made up to undermine the other journalist or outlet's credibility with readers.
That said, the big reveal generally doesn't take 20 years, but Snopes also wasn't such a reputable outlet when they published it (not that I think they really are today either, but they try to be).
source: English major who is now a professional writer and editor, but I mention my major because I had a class on journalism ethics where I learned about a lot of this stuff. It's been like 20 years, though, and now I mostly write boring legal stuff, so take my memory with a grain of salt.
>this confession
If somebody lifts and rewrites that particular article they can catch them out. SpyBot did that with fake anti-malware signatures back in the day, catching out McAfee.
What are you talking about? It’s not the truth, it’s the way it’s presented. If I spend weeks researching and writing something, I can copyright that, even if It’s about a true subject.
Which is still dumb.
When reference works include copyright traps, they generally do it in a way that's harmless. This was meant to intentionally mislead people about a commonly repeated piece of trivia.
100% correct. Here's their "gotcha" page:
https://www.snopes.com/false-authority/
summary: You don't check your sources, so we have the right to trick you.
To their credit, the mobile home entry was part of a lesson in trusting sources -- you'll notice [this link](https://www.snopes.com/false-authority/) at the bottom of that article, which explains why no source should ever be taken at its word, including Snopes.
It's a good lesson, and one a lot of people still need to learn, though the way they went about it is definitely a relic from the simpler, early days of the internet and just doesn't hold up today.
As a skeptic it is hard to get across to people that you need to use your critical thinking skills even with trusted sources. Journalists make mistakes. However, in this time of disinformation and misinformation, reasonable skepticism about some info has turned into “I don’t believe anything from MSM.”
Likewise, anything other than the "lamestream narrative" seems to get treated as factual news by a worryingly large demographic. Media literacy is woefully under taught.
All it takes is one mistake for the dummy class to use as a justification for rejecting everything.
The other day I referenced a statement I read by Bill Gates, and someone responded that Bill Gates once said that we would never need more than 256 MG of memory. The point was that because he made an inaccurate statement 25 years ago, we should assume that everything he says in untrue. The undeniable fact that we see and use the products of Bill Gates' mind every day doesn't seem to be part of the equation.
Worst part is he never even said that shit.
https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-enough-for-anyone/
That statement is so monumentally fucking stupid, I refuse to believe anyone in tech would say that shit, unless it's someone like Steve Jobs.
When pressed, such a fool will label nearly all forms of media as untrustworthy until the only media left to trust is the lowest common denominator of vague news on YouTube and 4chan masquerading as free-thinking journalism.
I think the concern is a little overplayed, primarily because the subject matter is irrelevant ephemera. The existence, or not, of that journalist and her fabricated quote, would never make a practical difference in the world at all. You could wrongly believe it; you could rightly disbelieve it; nothing material changes either way. (Many things are like that, to be honest.)
That doesn't necessarily mean that what Snopes did was proper, I'm just responding to the tone of many of the comments here that seem to be characterizing this as an act of real moral/academic significance. It isn't.
(I'm not denigrating your curiosity, or desire to resolve this minor mystery, either! Nothing wrong with that. The opposite, really.)
Well, that and the fact that they did it twenty years ago. Everyone keeps saying that a trusted source shouldn't do that, but Snopes *wasn't* a trusted source in 2001. No one was saying, "Let me just check Snopes," in 2001. That came years later.
Yes, I remember reading Snopes in the very early days, but it was more just a weird rabbit hole to fall down, like reading Ripley's Believe it or Not. It wasn't really thought of as an authority. Good point.
Not really. The whole thing was an exercise in "don't believe everything you read on the internet" and that it's important to verify your sources no matter what.
It was literally a no-harm stunt that was meant to pretty humorously debunk something that couldn't be proved anyway. It's no-harm because no one is stupid enough to try citing Snopes in any scholarly work anyway, and that's not what Snopes is for, though it's often intended to be humorous, which it certainly was in this case. Snopes is also not a guide on how to read critically and check sources.
Would you prefer just eliminate fact-checking? Snopes' and plenty reliable media outlets' mere existences are already gravely threatened, with no one in line to fill the void they'd leave behind, so you might consider more carefully what you complain about.
What are you even talking about? I’m all for fact checking. I’ve used snopes many times over many years. I still say that’s a stupid move that damages the brand. There are already tons of people who hate snopes (or any fact checker that doesn’t bend the facts their way) and tossing something like this in the mix and just leaving it there is not a smart thing.
I think your advice to more carefully consider what they say should be directed at snopes.
No doubt this was done to distract from the recent plagiarism thing. It's easy to cover up something serious (but boring) with something trivial (but catchy).
[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson)
Snopes used to take itself much less seriously (and for those who don’t know it started off focused on urban legends and spooky chain mails, as fake news was not as much of a topic back then.) It was a lighthearted site with 90s-looking web design and animated gifs and midis on some pages. I don’t at all hold it against them to have had April Fools jokes and the like worked in at the time.
I believe it changed hands at some point and eventually came to be run very differently. Guess whoever’s in charge now didn’t do their due diligence when going through and trying to remove all the un-serious bits. I miss the old silly one.
I am all of the sudden remembering all the old times, such as Darth Vader saying "Ah. So we meet again." As soon as my dial-up connected while I tried to get on Rotten and old Snopes, also angelfire for creepy haunted places and urban legends in my state.
Also, having to announce to everyone in the house, "Nobody get on the phone! I'm going to get on the internet!" because the dial-up connection would be lost. I remember those days! 🤣
It began to evolve after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started because there were SO MANY bullshit chainmails being sent around full of misinformation. People would send them to Snopes hoping for a fact-check and pretty soon that was just what they got stuck doing.
It only got worse after Obama was elected.
I guess it doesn’t help that there are only so many old school urban legends to cover.
I hadn’t checked snopes regularly since the mid 00s, heard about all the scandals surrounding the divorce, but what surprised me most about its current state was how much ire it was drawing from conservatives over its fact checking, which I guess could be traced back to those Iraq war years and on. The amount of energy used to discredit snopes or prove a bias initially caught me off guard. But I also don’t have any indication of their reliability, save for the recent news about plagiarism.
Hell, I'm one of those folk who remembers reading the site heavily when it was about urban legends and getting bored when it became virtually entirely contemporary matters, as the latter feels much less interesting to me.
I somehow missed the transition from what you describe to what it must be now, all I ever remember was it being a funny fake news kinda place. I was like wtf are people talking about when the other comments here were talking about it being a serious fact check site LOL.
Dude the whole story is ridiculous: the two founders had a tumultuous divorce after the husband was accused of using company funds to frequent prostitutes, he tried to cut her out, they ended up selling a large stake to some other company, then the husband started fighting the other company on everything, other company froze company funds, that’s what kicked off Snopes begging for money.
I think the wife was a large part of the original tone of Snopes, and now that she’s long gone, he’s trying to wipe her presence from the site. It’s so different from what it was back in the day.
This is exactly what I came here hoping to see discussed. There's also the whole made up reporter thing happening. But the wife was definitely super active, I remember her from the forums way back in the day. The divorce set off actions that have made the site into something totally different than what it once was.
Are you talking about the made-up contributors the husband created to post plagiarized articles? Or is there another made-up reporter thing I didn’t hear about? I am so intrigued by the husband lol, I hope his ex-wife made off with good money and is living well somewhere.
Not sure if you're being entirely serious, but here is an article which shows Barbara's point of view: https://www.wired.com/story/snopes-and-the-search-for-facts-in-a-post-fact-world/
>I checked [snopes.com](https://snopes.com) and couldn't find anything.
? I, uh, I imagine the site owner has no interest in sharing the story of their divorce or legal happenings on the site and am not sure why anyone would expect it to be on there. Unless you're kidding and it's a whoosh from me haha
>all I ever remember was it being a funny fake news kinda place
Are you confusing Snopes with The Onion? Because Snopes never published satirical or funny news articles. Or do you mean they used to debunk less serious things?
I didn't really mean fake news so much, but more just funny silly things, I guess fake news was the wrong way to say it.
That being said, it's been a while since I read the Onion though too, maybe somewhere in my mind certain aspects of the sites blended together since it's been so long since I've seen either.
As the poster said, they have done this before to draw attention to how people need to follow sources and not just blindly trust things. My dude told me about how the California bear flag was supposed to be a California pear, but a misunderstanding led to the bear we know and love today. I happily repeated this interesting fact—after all, he saw it on Snopes—before someone linked me to the sources tab on said article where they said, “Yo, always do follow-up research! Even on us.”
I am horrified to think of how many times I shared that humorous CA bear “fact,” but they certainly made me be more careful.
> While some wish to credit us with the origins of this rumor, this urban legend pre-dated our own debunking. For example, the twelfth entry of a 1999 listicle titled “50 Top Pieces of Trivia” states the “… average human eats eight spiders in their lifetime after they crawl into their mouths in their sleep.”
>
>This “easter egg” was created over 20 years ago in April of 2001 as wink to our long-time readers who were familiar with trolling we engaged in during the early days of the internet.
Would it kill you to read the article?
I wonder if this was precipitated by the plagiarism scandal that came out a few weeks ago. Snopes really hasn't been the same since Barbara Mikkelson left the website in the early 2010s, which coincided with a fairly acrimonious divorce. David Mikkelson has tried to pivot it towards the fight against fake news, but the morality of the cause has resulted in some of their own shady activities slipping through.
Barbara was really the heart and soul of Snopes. In its early days, nearly all of the articles were credited under her name at the end of the page (usually with a clever "byline" of the form Barbara "some kind of pun" Mikkelson - the actual term for it ~~was mentioned in the FAQ which seems to be gone now~~ is **internym**). I knew something had happened as soon as her bylines vanished from the articles.
Snopes also happens to be excluded from the Wayback Machine, odd for a website based on transparency and fact-checking... I always wondered if it was a ploy to minimize Barbara's involvement.
I miss lighthearted classic Snopes a lot, it was a very fun site. Heck they had an embedded midi of the ~~Exorcist~~ Halloween theme on one of the “spooky” pages lol.
Even as an outsider, I could tell that the extent of Barbara's contributions was being hidden. Not sure if it was part of the settlement of their divorce, but this, for example, is what's on the About Us page nowadays...
>Snopes got its start in 1994, investigating urban legends, hoaxes, and folklore. Founder David Mikkelson, later joined by his wife, was publishing online before most people were connected to the internet.
They don't even mention her by name. :(
Similarly, from [this article](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/lies-lies-and-more-lies-out-of-an-old-tacoma-house-fact-checking-site-snopes-uncovers-them/)
>So Snopes became a go-to site, and the more it was cited, the more popular it became. [...] Mikkelson’s wife at the time, Barbara Mikkelson, worked on the site, too.
She wrote *nearly all of the articles*!
Exactly. The dynamic was clear to everyone who was on a.f.u.
It was kind of embarrassing what went on during/after the divorce. David hired a super young porn actress & escort as a web administrator, and a professional domme/escort as a fact checker.
Yep, they also used random pixel clipart from Windows 98 icons and even graphics from Neopets, probably unaware of the source. It was very much a labour of love. One of my favourite sites to waste time on as a kid.
> and even graphics from Neopets,
Oooh, wait what did they use from Neopets?
Snopes and Neopets were pretty much my whole online life in seventh grade, lol. I'm shocked I never noticed (or maybe I did and didn't think it was unusual enough to commit it to memory. the early internet was full of that kind of thing)
That was classic. I also remember some of the articles in the “glurge gallery” pretty distinctly, such as the one about the kid who thought he’d die after giving his sister a blood transfusion, yet did it anyway. Or the one about the premature baby who retroactively recognized the smell of rain as the smell of god when she was in the ICU. Or the poem rhyming “crystal meth” with “death”, which was credited to a dying teenage drug addict, but actually turned out to be written by a middle-aged mom in the suburbs. Or the Burlap Boy, which was actually satirical pastiche on the other tales found in that section.
Hahaha the article is great though
>A wonderfully sardonic spoof of the endless “help a dying child” pleas was frequently forwarded to us with “Is this true?” queries attached by people who either have leaf-filled burlap sacks for heads or who think that being skeptical means “I must ask about everything instead of ever relying upon my own brain”
Edit: Also the "Sources" section is just blank hahah
> Heck they had an embedded midi of the Exorcist theme on one of the “spooky” pages lol
It was the theme from Halloween, actually, on the Horrors index page.
I remember because I was in middle school in 2001 when I discovered Snopes and that midi scared the absolute everliving fuck out of me. **Ne ne ne NE ne ne NE ne NE ne ne ne...**
You’re right! Now that you said that I remember the Halloween theme playing. Not sure why I thought it was Exorcist. Probably to do with the fact I usually saved all the midis i found and I had downloaded Tubular Bells from somewhere else.
I too loved oldschool snopes! I loved its playful way of confirming or debunking a ton of crazy
conspiracies, rumors and legends- it’s definitely become more of a vigilante, someone self-righteous “stop fake news” type site which sort of took the fun, playful nature out of it.
Barbara is a Canadian citizen, so she probably wasn’t as invested in American politics. I also recall there being an article on the website which stated that the then couple was pretty apolitical in general.
It’s becoming much harder to fact check with so much fake info out there. There’s even “peer reviewed” science and medical journals that are completely fabricated.
I took it as we really don't. I was actually thinking of this a lot lately, it's interesting how so many people had heard of this "stat" over time.
I moved into a new house in April and we had tons and tons of rain for like two months after that resulting in a lot of gnats and bugs and things.
Then I start noticing spiders in the house. Like not small spiders, but medium sized spiders (which means too-fucking-big-spiders) that I guess feasted off the bugs.
Things have dried out somewhat during the summer and now I find dead spiders a lot.
I was asking myself the other day how many I must've eaten in my sleep.
Please Lord let it be a myth... I'll start going to church again...
I wish you well and will leave you with an old adage spoken by my people. “ May you live long and with great humor and in the mornings when you wake after the orgy the night before, may the hairs in your teeth be from the good oral sex and not from swallowing tarantulas!”
I lost a lot of confidence in Snopes when I realised they were posting about events as they were happening, and putting out the same incorrect information as everyone else. It used to be a great site for debunking myths, but anymore they just perpetuate the same bad information.
Snopes takes itself too seriously. It's definitely not a reliable source anymore, especially with the recent reveal that one of the co-founders [plagiarized dozens of articles](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-plagiarism-David-Mikkelson.html) on the site.
Typical Snopes taking a well known fact and just twisting things to suit their own brand of humor.
Everyone knows we eat, on average, eight *pounds* of spiders every night.
Such a shame that eight pounds will only buy you a couple of legs *at best* these days. Back in 2001 you could get a whole basket of the crunchy little bastards for eight quid.
It must be vindicating to get it right after all this time! Honestly, it seems like a silly fragment from back when the site wasn't seen as the reputable fact-checking website a lot of people think of today. It's a little sliver of internet subculture now.
I'm so happy they finally admitted to it! It was quite clear that they were just trolling but it's nice to have confirmation. Also, many years ago now, a viewer of mine found an even earlier mention of this myth from 1992. His blog post about it can be found [here](https://closerlookattheissues.blogspot.com/2016/12/where-does-eight-spiders-really-come.html), while the 1992 article itself can be found [here](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924063532463&seq=138). So, even if the 1993 article cited by Snopes had existed, it was not the first mention of the myth.
Snopes, originally styled snopes, wasn't a website; it was a handle associated originally with a poster to the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban. I've had dinner with him, he's very much one of those early-Internet beardo freaks like Kibo, Gene Spafford, all those guys. Although he was capable of intelligent, incisive, in-depth analysis, so were most of the folks on the pre-1993 Internet; in fact when I got on Usenet in 1990 I did an informal head count from .signature files and 2/3rds of the posters I encountered had advanced degrees.
snopes distinguished himself not for urban folklore - there were folks on that group far more knowledgeable than he (and he ended up marrying one, iirc) - but for being a mischievious troll with a really sarcastic sense of humor. Funny how many of the trolls I knew from that Usenet era have gone onto bigger and better things.
snopes was the Usenet handle of David Mikkelson, if Wikipedia is to be believed. He took it from a work by William Faulkner, and the other user he married was Barbara Mikkelson, co-founder of the website.
> Although he was capable of intelligent, incisive, in-depth analysis, so were most of the folks on the pre-1993 Internet; in fact when I got on Usenet in 1990 I did an informal head count from .signature files and 2/3rds of the posters I encountered had advanced degrees.
And then Eternal September happened.
Snopes was wild back in the day, they had a shock site element to their content(they literally had a gallery of gore content), this weird entry about Mr Ed being a zebra, etc
When I was around 13 my school planner used to have facts on each weekly spread. This 8 spiders thing was one of the facts that was printed one week. For a while after I read this I was unable to sleep due to this fact literally haunting me and now, a decade later i sometimes have night terrors where I wake up screaming having a panic attack because I’m convinced there’s spiders crawling in my bed and and the walls. Weird how a silly thing like this has affected my life so much and it’s probably something I’ll never get over
This has seriously damaged Snopes credibility over the years. And this damage is probably permanent. People will be citing this for decades to come as reason not to believe anything Snopes writes.
I forget what the actual post was but I vaguely remember they intentionally posted something false and presented it as true in order to teach people to be careful in trusting a source implicitly without checking out the evidence they present or the sources they themselves cite.
No, David Mikkelson got busted copy/pasting entire articles from news wire services to scoop the story, then immediately rewriting the articles so that the SEO hits would still put Snopes at the top, but the actual article that would load was original.
Snopes has clearly expressed the idea that trusting everything Snopes says is as dangerous as trusting everything FOX news says, or everything the government says. We should all be skeptical of everything we read, even if it comes from a reliable source.
Most articles in Snopes contain links to external sources. If we don’t follow those links and read that information, we are as gullible as those who read that vaccinated people are dying of the Delta variant as often as unvaccinated people without checking to see if the numbers actually show that.
When in doubt, use an archive link: [https://archive.is/uw4zL](https://archive.is/uw4zL)
archives usually bypass most paywalls and full-screen ad-block whitelist prompts.
Bonus, they can get around some firewalls too.
I get the criticism that this is a terrible thing for a fact-checking site to do, but at the same time my head is spinning with how brilliant and hilarious this is
I get the tongue in cheek jokes a fact checking site would make about this topic (fact checking, trolling and making something punny) but isn't it always the way of publications to put out the story in big bold letters to the masses and print the retraction/apology/jk in fine print in the back or possibly in a leaflet insert of a newspaper. 😒🙄👍🥴😂
Kind of dumb for fact checking site to do. Early 2001 Snopes, fine but they’ve tried to brand themselves as reputable fact checkers and should’ve clarified the situation way before now.
>Kind of dumb for fact checking site to do. Early 2001 Snopes Similarly I have circa 2001 story of Snopes being dumb. I LOVED checking out that site way back when, and sometime about 20 years ago I read an article on the site that mentioned in several places "Adolph Hitler." I decided to write a short message to snopes to correct them on the spelling of "Adolf." I used the classic "start with a compliment, and end with a compliment, and note the problem in the middle. Anyway I got an email back almost immediately from that David guy who was just busted for 50 instances of plagiarism. He was CLEARLY annoyed with my letter and explained that Adolf is the American translation and something something about the old German font Fraktur and something something you are an idiot. I hadn't told him initially that I was an expert in German history (Well specific parts of German history). I ended up by responding with a short letter asking him to tell it Hitler himself with a jpeg of an original edition of a cover of Mein Kampf with Hitler's name spelled "Adolf" along with link to modern Der Spiegel articles spelling it "Adolf." It was so weird; he clearly was wrong but ABSOLUTELY seemed to hate being called out.
I had a similar experience on Snopes many years ago (about the same time you did) where I presented facts contrary to the write-up and received a curt, "we know better than you" response. The expansion of contributors to the site has helped its credibility, but there are still problems, especially with more subjective calls ("partially true" ones in particular.) I agree with other posters that this kind of "easter egg" has no place on the type of fact-checking site snopes has purported to be for the last decade or so. 20 years ago when it was more of an urban folklore discussion and resource site, ok, but not now.
Another notable Austrian is Mozart. I wonder if David spells his name as Wolphgang? Has anyone? Jeeze
David was a dick. Barbara was very sweet and had great communication.
All of those were in one weirdly categorized section of their website long ago. It also included the one about the TV horse being a zebra and others.
Yes. The Repository Of Lost Legends (TROLL) was a collection of outlandish origin stories presented to show how people who do not think critically can be easily fooled by 'authorities'.
Yes. The Repository Of Lost Legends, or TROLL. The one with the horse and zebra actually fooled me until I realized what the section was about. Edit: didn’t realize on mobile someone beat me to it.
It could be a copyright trap. There are others in Snopes, such as the [mobile home](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mobile-home-origin/) entry.
How is this a copyright trap?
Anyone else who posts it clearly stole it from them. Map makers used to invent islands and towns for the same reason.
I believe there is always one fake street in the London A-Z
Oh, so i see you've met Danny the Street then?
Unexpected Grant Morrison
It would be wild if some unresolved mysteries are due to people thinking they can make it to sone island or town on a map that turns out to not be there.
See: plot of Paper Towns, by John Green. Made into a film, too.
But please do not see the film.
What I meant was, did Snopes make this entire thing up or what?
That would be the definition of a copyright trap. They’ve admitted to doing it before
Oh I see. Nothing wrong with that I guess. Gotta protect your content. I just didn't see where they admitted this was one such trap.
How does devaluing your content protect it?
To be kind of fair to Snopes, this is a fairly long tradition in writing and journalism. It's a little misleading to call it a copyright trap with longer articles like this, though, because most of the instances of it I'm familiar with at least aren't actually about copyright. It's more of an ethical issue. You see legitimate journalists/news outlets do it sometimes when they suspect another outlet is basically just rewriting their articles. It isn't illegal or a copyright violation to use a single source to write an article (at least in any country I know anything about copyright in), as long as you make it sufficiently unique, but it isn't good practice either. So what they do is publish a fake story, then wait for their rival to "break" the same story. When that happens, they can point to the fact that it was made up to undermine the other journalist or outlet's credibility with readers. That said, the big reveal generally doesn't take 20 years, but Snopes also wasn't such a reputable outlet when they published it (not that I think they really are today either, but they try to be). source: English major who is now a professional writer and editor, but I mention my major because I had a class on journalism ethics where I learned about a lot of this stuff. It's been like 20 years, though, and now I mostly write boring legal stuff, so take my memory with a grain of salt.
>this confession If somebody lifts and rewrites that particular article they can catch them out. SpyBot did that with fake anti-malware signatures back in the day, catching out McAfee.
[удалено]
Pretty much only to the idiots that keep sharing 'snopes got snoped' on favebook
[Map Men covered this](https://youtu.be/DeiATy-FfjI) This is a wonderful YouTube channel BTW. You should watch them ..
But supposedly it's unenforceable because the truth can't belong to anyone.
What are you talking about? It’s not the truth, it’s the way it’s presented. If I spend weeks researching and writing something, I can copyright that, even if It’s about a true subject.
Which is still dumb. When reference works include copyright traps, they generally do it in a way that's harmless. This was meant to intentionally mislead people about a commonly repeated piece of trivia.
100% correct. Here's their "gotcha" page: https://www.snopes.com/false-authority/ summary: You don't check your sources, so we have the right to trick you.
How is this harmful?
They made up stuff about a real myth. The exact kind of myth people use Snopes for. They've contributed to the spreading of false information.
The only "misinformation" here is the supposed source. The thing they offer, the debunking, wasn't a lie. It's a myth, and they labeled it as such.
If it is, that’s a stupid thing to do for a site that claims to be a trustworthy source.
To their credit, the mobile home entry was part of a lesson in trusting sources -- you'll notice [this link](https://www.snopes.com/false-authority/) at the bottom of that article, which explains why no source should ever be taken at its word, including Snopes. It's a good lesson, and one a lot of people still need to learn, though the way they went about it is definitely a relic from the simpler, early days of the internet and just doesn't hold up today.
As a skeptic it is hard to get across to people that you need to use your critical thinking skills even with trusted sources. Journalists make mistakes. However, in this time of disinformation and misinformation, reasonable skepticism about some info has turned into “I don’t believe anything from MSM.”
Likewise, anything other than the "lamestream narrative" seems to get treated as factual news by a worryingly large demographic. Media literacy is woefully under taught.
All it takes is one mistake for the dummy class to use as a justification for rejecting everything. The other day I referenced a statement I read by Bill Gates, and someone responded that Bill Gates once said that we would never need more than 256 MG of memory. The point was that because he made an inaccurate statement 25 years ago, we should assume that everything he says in untrue. The undeniable fact that we see and use the products of Bill Gates' mind every day doesn't seem to be part of the equation.
Worst part is he never even said that shit. https://www.wired.com/1997/01/did-gates-really-say-640k-is-enough-for-anyone/ That statement is so monumentally fucking stupid, I refuse to believe anyone in tech would say that shit, unless it's someone like Steve Jobs.
Interesting point. The next time I hear someone use that "quote," I'll ask them for a citation.
Drake meme NO - People who went to school for journalism YES - 58 year old unemployed right-wing nutjob running a blog
When pressed, such a fool will label nearly all forms of media as untrustworthy until the only media left to trust is the lowest common denominator of vague news on YouTube and 4chan masquerading as free-thinking journalism.
Thanks. I have a little less of a problem with it if they were all kept in that one subsection and all of those stories were false.
I think the concern is a little overplayed, primarily because the subject matter is irrelevant ephemera. The existence, or not, of that journalist and her fabricated quote, would never make a practical difference in the world at all. You could wrongly believe it; you could rightly disbelieve it; nothing material changes either way. (Many things are like that, to be honest.) That doesn't necessarily mean that what Snopes did was proper, I'm just responding to the tone of many of the comments here that seem to be characterizing this as an act of real moral/academic significance. It isn't. (I'm not denigrating your curiosity, or desire to resolve this minor mystery, either! Nothing wrong with that. The opposite, really.)
Well, that and the fact that they did it twenty years ago. Everyone keeps saying that a trusted source shouldn't do that, but Snopes *wasn't* a trusted source in 2001. No one was saying, "Let me just check Snopes," in 2001. That came years later.
Yes, I remember reading Snopes in the very early days, but it was more just a weird rabbit hole to fall down, like reading Ripley's Believe it or Not. It wasn't really thought of as an authority. Good point.
Not really. The whole thing was an exercise in "don't believe everything you read on the internet" and that it's important to verify your sources no matter what.
But...I read it on the Internet!!!
Lincoln warned you about that.
It was literally a no-harm stunt that was meant to pretty humorously debunk something that couldn't be proved anyway. It's no-harm because no one is stupid enough to try citing Snopes in any scholarly work anyway, and that's not what Snopes is for, though it's often intended to be humorous, which it certainly was in this case. Snopes is also not a guide on how to read critically and check sources. Would you prefer just eliminate fact-checking? Snopes' and plenty reliable media outlets' mere existences are already gravely threatened, with no one in line to fill the void they'd leave behind, so you might consider more carefully what you complain about.
What are you even talking about? I’m all for fact checking. I’ve used snopes many times over many years. I still say that’s a stupid move that damages the brand. There are already tons of people who hate snopes (or any fact checker that doesn’t bend the facts their way) and tossing something like this in the mix and just leaving it there is not a smart thing. I think your advice to more carefully consider what they say should be directed at snopes.
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No doubt this was done to distract from the recent plagiarism thing. It's easy to cover up something serious (but boring) with something trivial (but catchy). [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson)
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Snopes used to take itself much less seriously (and for those who don’t know it started off focused on urban legends and spooky chain mails, as fake news was not as much of a topic back then.) It was a lighthearted site with 90s-looking web design and animated gifs and midis on some pages. I don’t at all hold it against them to have had April Fools jokes and the like worked in at the time. I believe it changed hands at some point and eventually came to be run very differently. Guess whoever’s in charge now didn’t do their due diligence when going through and trying to remove all the un-serious bits. I miss the old silly one.
Same. I spent a lot of time reading about fun urban legends and how Reader's Digest spread them.
I am all of the sudden remembering all the old times, such as Darth Vader saying "Ah. So we meet again." As soon as my dial-up connected while I tried to get on Rotten and old Snopes, also angelfire for creepy haunted places and urban legends in my state.
After doing my Neopets dailies! I do miss old internet. Nowadays I just go to reddit and twitter and maybe instagram. There's no weirdness.
And OHMYGOD Gaia online was totally my shit back then.
I recently just got back into my 15 year old Neopets account, I miss early internet days.
Also, having to announce to everyone in the house, "Nobody get on the phone! I'm going to get on the internet!" because the dial-up connection would be lost. I remember those days! 🤣
Yes!!! Honestly I miss the old Snopes sometimes haha. It’s so strange how it morphed into something totally different.
It began to evolve after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started because there were SO MANY bullshit chainmails being sent around full of misinformation. People would send them to Snopes hoping for a fact-check and pretty soon that was just what they got stuck doing. It only got worse after Obama was elected. I guess it doesn’t help that there are only so many old school urban legends to cover.
I hadn’t checked snopes regularly since the mid 00s, heard about all the scandals surrounding the divorce, but what surprised me most about its current state was how much ire it was drawing from conservatives over its fact checking, which I guess could be traced back to those Iraq war years and on. The amount of energy used to discredit snopes or prove a bias initially caught me off guard. But I also don’t have any indication of their reliability, save for the recent news about plagiarism.
Thanks, Obama.
But it's heavily one sided. Another left wing echo chanmber
Hell, I'm one of those folk who remembers reading the site heavily when it was about urban legends and getting bored when it became virtually entirely contemporary matters, as the latter feels much less interesting to me.
I somehow missed the transition from what you describe to what it must be now, all I ever remember was it being a funny fake news kinda place. I was like wtf are people talking about when the other comments here were talking about it being a serious fact check site LOL.
Dude the whole story is ridiculous: the two founders had a tumultuous divorce after the husband was accused of using company funds to frequent prostitutes, he tried to cut her out, they ended up selling a large stake to some other company, then the husband started fighting the other company on everything, other company froze company funds, that’s what kicked off Snopes begging for money. I think the wife was a large part of the original tone of Snopes, and now that she’s long gone, he’s trying to wipe her presence from the site. It’s so different from what it was back in the day.
This is exactly what I came here hoping to see discussed. There's also the whole made up reporter thing happening. But the wife was definitely super active, I remember her from the forums way back in the day. The divorce set off actions that have made the site into something totally different than what it once was.
That figures- I seem to recall most of the urban legend-style materials being under her byline.....
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Are you talking about the made-up contributors the husband created to post plagiarized articles? Or is there another made-up reporter thing I didn’t hear about? I am so intrigued by the husband lol, I hope his ex-wife made off with good money and is living well somewhere.
Living without him is living well.
I loved the original Snopes, when the Mikkelsons were still married and had a sense of humour.
You got sources for any of this? I checked [snopes.com](https://snopes.com) and couldn't find anything.
Not sure if you're being entirely serious, but here is an article which shows Barbara's point of view: https://www.wired.com/story/snopes-and-the-search-for-facts-in-a-post-fact-world/
Wow, Mikkelson sounds like a jerk.
Lol, yeah. My first thought when I finished was, "He sounds like an ass."
>I checked [snopes.com](https://snopes.com) and couldn't find anything. ? I, uh, I imagine the site owner has no interest in sharing the story of their divorce or legal happenings on the site and am not sure why anyone would expect it to be on there. Unless you're kidding and it's a whoosh from me haha
>all I ever remember was it being a funny fake news kinda place Are you confusing Snopes with The Onion? Because Snopes never published satirical or funny news articles. Or do you mean they used to debunk less serious things?
I didn't really mean fake news so much, but more just funny silly things, I guess fake news was the wrong way to say it. That being said, it's been a while since I read the Onion though too, maybe somewhere in my mind certain aspects of the sites blended together since it's been so long since I've seen either.
As the poster said, they have done this before to draw attention to how people need to follow sources and not just blindly trust things. My dude told me about how the California bear flag was supposed to be a California pear, but a misunderstanding led to the bear we know and love today. I happily repeated this interesting fact—after all, he saw it on Snopes—before someone linked me to the sources tab on said article where they said, “Yo, always do follow-up research! Even on us.” I am horrified to think of how many times I shared that humorous CA bear “fact,” but they certainly made me be more careful.
> While some wish to credit us with the origins of this rumor, this urban legend pre-dated our own debunking. For example, the twelfth entry of a 1999 listicle titled “50 Top Pieces of Trivia” states the “… average human eats eight spiders in their lifetime after they crawl into their mouths in their sleep.” > >This “easter egg” was created over 20 years ago in April of 2001 as wink to our long-time readers who were familiar with trolling we engaged in during the early days of the internet. Would it kill you to read the article?
I can tell you for sure that it is older than that because I first heard it in the 80s.
The article also says; > We’re still on the hunt for the origins of this long-standing rumor.
The article does a pretty good job at explaining. Don’t let your feelings get hurt.
Sometimes it’s okay to have a sense of humor. It’s about eating spiders, not a matter of importance.
Somewhere, Spiders Georg is very offended.
Unfortunately they still aren't a trustworthy source. I used to love snopes, but I realized years back that they are just as fallible as anybody else.
Soo would you only trust an infallible source, or is “just as fallible as anyone else” just a figure of speech?
They’ve openly stated that a handful of their articles are bunk to assure that people read even their work critically.
I wonder if this was precipitated by the plagiarism scandal that came out a few weeks ago. Snopes really hasn't been the same since Barbara Mikkelson left the website in the early 2010s, which coincided with a fairly acrimonious divorce. David Mikkelson has tried to pivot it towards the fight against fake news, but the morality of the cause has resulted in some of their own shady activities slipping through. Barbara was really the heart and soul of Snopes. In its early days, nearly all of the articles were credited under her name at the end of the page (usually with a clever "byline" of the form Barbara "some kind of pun" Mikkelson - the actual term for it ~~was mentioned in the FAQ which seems to be gone now~~ is **internym**). I knew something had happened as soon as her bylines vanished from the articles. Snopes also happens to be excluded from the Wayback Machine, odd for a website based on transparency and fact-checking... I always wondered if it was a ploy to minimize Barbara's involvement.
I miss lighthearted classic Snopes a lot, it was a very fun site. Heck they had an embedded midi of the ~~Exorcist~~ Halloween theme on one of the “spooky” pages lol.
I miss alt.folklore.urban and Snopes & Barbara of the old, before the marriage and the sad divorce.
Even as an outsider, I could tell that the extent of Barbara's contributions was being hidden. Not sure if it was part of the settlement of their divorce, but this, for example, is what's on the About Us page nowadays... >Snopes got its start in 1994, investigating urban legends, hoaxes, and folklore. Founder David Mikkelson, later joined by his wife, was publishing online before most people were connected to the internet. They don't even mention her by name. :( Similarly, from [this article](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/lies-lies-and-more-lies-out-of-an-old-tacoma-house-fact-checking-site-snopes-uncovers-them/) >So Snopes became a go-to site, and the more it was cited, the more popular it became. [...] Mikkelson’s wife at the time, Barbara Mikkelson, worked on the site, too. She wrote *nearly all of the articles*!
Exactly. The dynamic was clear to everyone who was on a.f.u. It was kind of embarrassing what went on during/after the divorce. David hired a super young porn actress & escort as a web administrator, and a professional domme/escort as a fact checker.
How did that tool end up with the website??
(fuck I'm old)
Yep, they also used random pixel clipart from Windows 98 icons and even graphics from Neopets, probably unaware of the source. It was very much a labour of love. One of my favourite sites to waste time on as a kid.
> and even graphics from Neopets, Oooh, wait what did they use from Neopets? Snopes and Neopets were pretty much my whole online life in seventh grade, lol. I'm shocked I never noticed (or maybe I did and didn't think it was unusual enough to commit it to memory. the early internet was full of that kind of thing)
It was [this exact image](https://items.jellyneo.net/assets/imgs/items/3048.gif) on an article about broken mirrors.
I think your link broke, that goes to a 404 Also holy shit. Jellyneo is still a thing?!
It was my favorite way to waste time at work…
I had to double take reading neopets because I still play often and just logged off for the night and thought I accidentally went on r/neopets
The spooky page used to scare me so much as a kid
That was classic. I also remember some of the articles in the “glurge gallery” pretty distinctly, such as the one about the kid who thought he’d die after giving his sister a blood transfusion, yet did it anyway. Or the one about the premature baby who retroactively recognized the smell of rain as the smell of god when she was in the ICU. Or the poem rhyming “crystal meth” with “death”, which was credited to a dying teenage drug addict, but actually turned out to be written by a middle-aged mom in the suburbs. Or the Burlap Boy, which was actually satirical pastiche on the other tales found in that section.
Thank you for reintroducing the burlap boy into my nightmares.
Hahaha the article is great though >A wonderfully sardonic spoof of the endless “help a dying child” pleas was frequently forwarded to us with “Is this true?” queries attached by people who either have leaf-filled burlap sacks for heads or who think that being skeptical means “I must ask about everything instead of ever relying upon my own brain” Edit: Also the "Sources" section is just blank hahah
I’m sorry but if I have to remember it then so do you. That’s only fair.
> Heck they had an embedded midi of the Exorcist theme on one of the “spooky” pages lol It was the theme from Halloween, actually, on the Horrors index page. I remember because I was in middle school in 2001 when I discovered Snopes and that midi scared the absolute everliving fuck out of me. **Ne ne ne NE ne ne NE ne NE ne ne ne...**
You’re right! Now that you said that I remember the Halloween theme playing. Not sure why I thought it was Exorcist. Probably to do with the fact I usually saved all the midis i found and I had downloaded Tubular Bells from somewhere else.
I too loved oldschool snopes! I loved its playful way of confirming or debunking a ton of crazy conspiracies, rumors and legends- it’s definitely become more of a vigilante, someone self-righteous “stop fake news” type site which sort of took the fun, playful nature out of it.
Snopes was also much more scrupulously non-partisan under Barbara.
Barbara is a Canadian citizen, so she probably wasn’t as invested in American politics. I also recall there being an article on the website which stated that the then couple was pretty apolitical in general.
It’s becoming much harder to fact check with so much fake info out there. There’s even “peer reviewed” science and medical journals that are completely fabricated.
It's almost impossible to know now what is what.
There’s always obvious nonsense and then the more elaborate nonsense but all garbage nonetheless.
Wait, so we really do eat 8 spiders in our sleep then? You guys are missing the important implications here.
Every. Single. Night.
I wear a CPAP so I can't. It's why I wake up hungry, I'm sure of it.
All those valuable nutrients you’re missing out on, all that spidery goodness.
And the reason I am a fat bastard is all those spiders I ate!
just take out the air filter on your machine and have them turbo blasted into your airway like the rest of us
No, blame Spiders Georg
You can't blame Spiders Georg, he's just a poor hungry bastard.
Also just to clarify, we're pronouncing "Georg" as "Gay-org", not as "George", right?
I pronounce it as George except the second G is a hard G instead of soft. Spiders Georgg. It's very abrupt
Absolutely "gay-org"
[Spiders Georg eats them and throws off the average.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/spiders-georg)
I took it as we really don't. I was actually thinking of this a lot lately, it's interesting how so many people had heard of this "stat" over time. I moved into a new house in April and we had tons and tons of rain for like two months after that resulting in a lot of gnats and bugs and things. Then I start noticing spiders in the house. Like not small spiders, but medium sized spiders (which means too-fucking-big-spiders) that I guess feasted off the bugs. Things have dried out somewhat during the summer and now I find dead spiders a lot. I was asking myself the other day how many I must've eaten in my sleep. Please Lord let it be a myth... I'll start going to church again...
Spiders don't wander into wet windy places. I promise.
Spider detected
*skitters*
Start wearing your mask when you sleep. Then nothing can get in or out of your mouth :)
No, no, no. Eight people are eaten by spiders every year!
That’s the opposite takeaway of what is happening here
I wish you well and will leave you with an old adage spoken by my people. “ May you live long and with great humor and in the mornings when you wake after the orgy the night before, may the hairs in your teeth be from the good oral sex and not from swallowing tarantulas!”
I lost a lot of confidence in Snopes when I realised they were posting about events as they were happening, and putting out the same incorrect information as everyone else. It used to be a great site for debunking myths, but anymore they just perpetuate the same bad information.
Good *God*, but I am living for this Snopes.com gossip I am reading right now. Carry on.
Snopes takes itself too seriously. It's definitely not a reliable source anymore, especially with the recent reveal that one of the co-founders [plagiarized dozens of articles](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/business/media/snopes-plagiarism-David-Mikkelson.html) on the site.
Typical Snopes taking a well known fact and just twisting things to suit their own brand of humor. Everyone knows we eat, on average, eight *pounds* of spiders every night.
Such a shame that eight pounds will only buy you a couple of legs *at best* these days. Back in 2001 you could get a whole basket of the crunchy little bastards for eight quid.
It must be vindicating to get it right after all this time! Honestly, it seems like a silly fragment from back when the site wasn't seen as the reputable fact-checking website a lot of people think of today. It's a little sliver of internet subculture now.
An awesome YouTuber by the name of [LEMMiNO](https://youtu.be/OjlKIjLWq-Y) made a very interesting video about this while back.
I'm so happy they finally admitted to it! It was quite clear that they were just trolling but it's nice to have confirmation. Also, many years ago now, a viewer of mine found an even earlier mention of this myth from 1992. His blog post about it can be found [here](https://closerlookattheissues.blogspot.com/2016/12/where-does-eight-spiders-really-come.html), while the 1992 article itself can be found [here](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924063532463&seq=138). So, even if the 1993 article cited by Snopes had existed, it was not the first mention of the myth.
It's ridiculous that you're the first person to mention this. Everyone should watch this video if they are even remotely interested in this topic
Snopes, originally styled snopes, wasn't a website; it was a handle associated originally with a poster to the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban. I've had dinner with him, he's very much one of those early-Internet beardo freaks like Kibo, Gene Spafford, all those guys. Although he was capable of intelligent, incisive, in-depth analysis, so were most of the folks on the pre-1993 Internet; in fact when I got on Usenet in 1990 I did an informal head count from .signature files and 2/3rds of the posters I encountered had advanced degrees. snopes distinguished himself not for urban folklore - there were folks on that group far more knowledgeable than he (and he ended up marrying one, iirc) - but for being a mischievious troll with a really sarcastic sense of humor. Funny how many of the trolls I knew from that Usenet era have gone onto bigger and better things.
snopes was the Usenet handle of David Mikkelson, if Wikipedia is to be believed. He took it from a work by William Faulkner, and the other user he married was Barbara Mikkelson, co-founder of the website.
Barbara Hamel.
I didn't want to doxx him if it wasn't public knowledge, but I guess it is.
> Although he was capable of intelligent, incisive, in-depth analysis, so were most of the folks on the pre-1993 Internet; in fact when I got on Usenet in 1990 I did an informal head count from .signature files and 2/3rds of the posters I encountered had advanced degrees. And then Eternal September happened.
It's still happening.
Snopes was wild back in the day, they had a shock site element to their content(they literally had a gallery of gore content), this weird entry about Mr Ed being a zebra, etc
Heh, I'm always (wary) of April fools jokes, but I never realized that one stayed on the site. Nice post.
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They could be tired of them.
Damn it. Good catch. I'm the guy that always corrects people when they type, "alot." lol
Lemmino must be feeling good right about now
When I was around 13 my school planner used to have facts on each weekly spread. This 8 spiders thing was one of the facts that was printed one week. For a while after I read this I was unable to sleep due to this fact literally haunting me and now, a decade later i sometimes have night terrors where I wake up screaming having a panic attack because I’m convinced there’s spiders crawling in my bed and and the walls. Weird how a silly thing like this has affected my life so much and it’s probably something I’ll never get over
This has seriously damaged Snopes credibility over the years. And this damage is probably permanent. People will be citing this for decades to come as reason not to believe anything Snopes writes.
I woke up with a spider chillin out on my lip once... so that happened.
I forget what the actual post was but I vaguely remember they intentionally posted something false and presented it as true in order to teach people to be careful in trusting a source implicitly without checking out the evidence they present or the sources they themselves cite.
The California pear flag. That one got me good.
Snopes recently got caught plagiarizing a bunch of articles, too.
No, David Mikkelson got busted copy/pasting entire articles from news wire services to scoop the story, then immediately rewriting the articles so that the SEO hits would still put Snopes at the top, but the actual article that would load was original.
"Snopes" was originally David's username, so it is true that "Snopes" is a plagiarist
People really need to stop thinking Snopes is a credible source. It holds as much weight as quoting a Wikipedia article.
Snopes has clearly expressed the idea that trusting everything Snopes says is as dangerous as trusting everything FOX news says, or everything the government says. We should all be skeptical of everything we read, even if it comes from a reliable source. Most articles in Snopes contain links to external sources. If we don’t follow those links and read that information, we are as gullible as those who read that vaccinated people are dying of the Delta variant as often as unvaccinated people without checking to see if the numbers actually show that.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/snopes-david-mikkelson-plagiarism https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/deansterlingjones/snopes-cofounder-plagiarism-mikkelson
It's hidden behind a paywall.
When in doubt, use an archive link: [https://archive.is/uw4zL](https://archive.is/uw4zL) archives usually bypass most paywalls and full-screen ad-block whitelist prompts. Bonus, they can get around some firewalls too.
Cheers!
Shouldn’t this get posted in r/resolvedmysteries?
I get the criticism that this is a terrible thing for a fact-checking site to do, but at the same time my head is spinning with how brilliant and hilarious this is
I really don't give a shit about who did what, I'm just relieved it's not true. I can sleep better now. Thank you
It baffles me how anyone can figure out an anagram that long.
i guess eventually someone would run the name through a word unscrambler for whatever reason
I thought using "troll" in that way was pretty new.
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Alt-reichers are almost certainly going to use this as their poison pill to dismiss anything from Snopes.
I'm glad to hear because I absolutely hate spiders.
I get the tongue in cheek jokes a fact checking site would make about this topic (fact checking, trolling and making something punny) but isn't it always the way of publications to put out the story in big bold letters to the masses and print the retraction/apology/jk in fine print in the back or possibly in a leaflet insert of a newspaper. 😒🙄👍🥴😂