Snopes Debunking of People’s Cube needs more Debunking

Snopes.com, a fact-checking website with a mission to uphold the Current Truth by demolishing unauthorized deviations from the Party line (while leaving the Party-approved deviations undisturbed), has stepped in it when it began to disprove the People’s Cube satirical fiction.

Their first few debunkings of our political fantasies were thorough and neutral in nature, which made them quite amusing. They started with our story about how Rosie O’Donnell tattooed the black flag of ISIS on her butt to protest American imperialism. Snopes’s professional journalistic investigation into this subject matter made a fascinating read. A few more similar debunkings of our political parodies followed, which one might call “over-debunking.” Naturally, we responded with more spoofs about how the Snopes.com CEO was arrested on charges of fraud and corruption, and how Snopes denied visiting the White House during the White House visit.

For one reason or another, these Snopes spoofs remained undebunked. Instead, Snopes changed its tone. It still continued to debunk our satires, but it stopped providing the link to the source or even referring to our site by name. Finally it stopped mentioning the fact that the debunked stories were, indeed, political satires. We call that under-debunking.

Thus, the latest Snopes debunking made us feel thoroughly under-debunked. At best it was unprofessional; at worst it was slanderous and knowingly misleading. See the screenshot above and our satire here.

In a language that Snopes editors can understand, their hurtful microagression against us caused us to retreat to our designated safe space, where we still remain, tallying the following grievances:

1. Snopes hasn’t provided a link to the source, nor mentioned The People’s Cube by name.
2. Snopes falsely described us as “a clickbait web site known for spreading malware,” which is slanderous misinformation.
3. While our satire was clearly a response to Zakaria’s asinine article gloating over the premature deaths of white males, which we extrapolated to the extermination of white females through Jihad, rape, and sex slavery, the Snopes’s “debunking” omits this point entirely, stating only that “There was nothing to the report” and that “it was just another fake news item that apparently originated with a clickbait web site known for spreading malware.”
4. At the very bottom of the page, however, the Snopes article is tagged as “satire” and “The People’s Cube,” while none of these words appear in the body of the article, which is what most people will read. Thus, Snopes was well aware that this was satire and who the author was, but it knowingly withheld this information from its readers, which is called “intentional misleading.”
5. For a self-described fact-checking website that claims to be “the definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation,” such biased, slanderous, and intentionally misleading misinformation constitutes malpractice, as it violates public trust.
6. In addition to being unprofessional, slanderous, and misleading, this under-debunking was also plain stupid: if you want to lie about something, at least make sure you flush the evidence and wash your hands afterwards.
7. The author of the article is listed as one Jeff Zarronandia, “an American author and journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for numismatics in 2006 and was one of four finalists for the prize in 2008. He was also the winner of the Distinguished Conflagration Award of the American Society of Muleskinners for 2005.” While this is obviously an attempt at a joke, this joker seems to deny the right to a joke to others. Besides, the very idea of listing made-up prizes, awards, and societies as his credentials on a fact-checking resource surpasses unprofessionalism and approaches imbecility. Perhaps Snopes should do some fact-checking on its authors before it attempts fact-checking satirical fiction.
8. We have yet to see Snopes debunking our earlier report about how urban legends website Snopes.com has determined that its own existence was fabricated. See below.

Snopes Verifies Snopes is a Hoax

Urban legends website Snopes.com determines its own existence is fabricated

The site once considered the authority on Internet hoaxes and urban legends issued an ironic press release Friday acknowledging that their mission to debunk the rampant mythology found on the Internet was at odds with the fact they do not exist.

Author’s note: Having no PhD, I am unable to interpret the significance of this elaborate deception. Is there an academic in the house….?

EDITORS NOTE: This political satire originally appeared on The Peoples Cube.

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