No, FactCheck.org didn’t “bust” Snopes.com

Facebook has teamed up with dozens of fact-checking organizations in dozens of countries to try to curb fake news online. PolitiFact is among them, as is FactCheck.org. Until recently, Snopes.com also had a partnership with the social media giant.

A June 7 Facebook post seeks to undermine Snopes.com's fact-checking efforts, claiming that it was "busted" as a "100% fake fact-checking site."

"FactCheck.org exposed Snopes.com as an extremely liberal propaganda site with an agenda to discredit anything that appears to be conservative," the post says. "Snopes has no employees and its owner has zero investigative research experience and Facebook has hired him to fact check the news on FB. And Soros and the DNC have just been exposed as Snopes only client. What does that tell you! George Soros and DNC propaganda site."

This post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

Both Snopes.com and FactCheck.org published stories denying the allegation.

In February 2018, Snopes.com reported that "a meme about Snopes.com has been debunked by the very source it cites."

"The Facebook part is the only part of this meme that is somewhat true, although the rest — as you may have guessed — is not," the story by Brooke Binkowski, who was managing editor for Snopes.com at the time." We have been partnered with Facebook for more than a year, working alongside other organizations around the world to fact-check corrosive fake news and propaganda before it contributes to ultraviolence, mass displacements, or destabilization on a global scale."

Snopes.com goes on to say the site is made up of a "team of highly experienced investigative journalists" and that founder and chief executive officer David Mikkelson has been running Snopes.com for more than 20 years, though many of its reporters don’t have formal journalism training.

Two photos included in the Facebook post that claim to show the "Snopes CEO" with Soros do not show Mikkelson, Snopes says. "He has dark hair, and there the resemblance to the photographs ends."

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"None of us works with or for any political campaign or party, nor have any of us so much as met George Soros and probably wouldn’t recognize him if we did," the story says.

In March 2018, FactCheck.org reported that nearly a decade earlier, in 2009, it addressed questions of Snopes.com's alleged political bias and wrote that it "found the website’s work to be ‘solid and well-documented’ and that its articles appeared ‘utterly poker-face’ when tackling rumors about Democratic and Republican politicians."

"At no point did we ever ‘expose’ the myth-busting website," FactCheck.org reporter D'Angelo Gore wrote.

In February, Snopes.com announced it was pulling out of its partnership with Facebook because it didn’t have the bandwidth to sign on for a third year.

We rate this Facebook post as False.