Snopes

Key takeaways

Snopes belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Snopes to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Snopes from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Snopes (), formerly known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a "well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors" on the Internet. The site has also been seen as a source for both validating and debunking urban legends and similar stories in American popular culture.

History

1990s In 1994, David and Barbara Mikkelson created an urban folklore web site that would become Snopes.com. Snopes was an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends, which mainly presented search results of user discussions based at first on their contributions to the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban (AFU) where they had been active. The site grew to encompass a wide range of subjects and became a resource to which Internet users began submitting pictures and stories of questionable veracity. According to the Mikkelsons, Snopes predated the search engine concept of fact-checking via search results. David Mikkelson had originally adopted the username "Snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner) in AFU.

2000s In 2002, the site had become known well enough that a television pilot by writer-director Michael Levine called Snopes: Urban Legends was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host; however, it did not air on major networks.

2010s By 2010, the site was attracting seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month. By mid-2014, Barbara had not written for Snopes "in several years", and David hired users from Snopes.com's message board to assist him in running the site. The Mikkelsons divorced around that time. Christopher Richmond and Drew Schoentrup became part owners in July 2016 with the purchase of Barbara Mikkelson's share by the internet media management company Proper Media. On March 9, 2017, David Mikkelson terminated the brokering agreement with Proper Media, which was also the company that provided Snopes with web development, hosting, and advertising support. The move prompted Proper Media to stop remitting advertising revenue and to file a lawsuit in May. In late June, Bardav—the company founded by David and Barbara Mikkelson in 2003 to own and operate snopes.com—started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to continue operations. They raised $500,000 in 24 hours. Later in August, a judge ordered Proper Media to disburse advertising revenues to Bardav while the case was pending. In July 2018, Snopes abruptly terminated its contract with Managing Editor Brooke Binkowski, with no explanation. By the time Snopes co-founder and CEO David Mikkelson confirmed the termination to her, the situation was still not clear. In early 2019, Snopes announced that it had acquired the website OnTheIssues.org, and is "hard at work modernizing its extensive archives". OnTheIssues is a website that seeks to "present all the relevant evidence, assess how strongly each piece supports or opposes a position, and summarize it with an average" in order to "provide voters with reliable information on candidates' policy positions". In 2018 and 2019, Snopes fact-checked several articles from The Babylon Bee, a satirical website, rating them "False". The decision resulted in Facebook adding warnings to links to those articles shared on its site. Snopes added a new rating called "Labeled Satire" to identify satirical stories. Also in 2019, Snopes was embroiled in legal disputes with Proper Media, with a court case scheduled for spring 2020. By then Proper Media had become a co-owner of Bardav through acquiring Barbara Mikkelson's half-interest share, intending to take overall ownership of Snopes for its own "portfolio of media sites". The move failed as David Mikkelson had no intention to sell his share.

2020s

COVID-19 pandemic and misinformation

As the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, many people tried to "educate themselves on the coronavirus" and find "any comfort, certainty, or hope for a cure [for the coronavirus]". Snopes has around 237 COVID-related fact-checking articles.

Plagiarism by co-founder David Mikkelson On August 13, 2021, BuzzFeed News published an investigation by reporter Dean Sterling Jones that showed David Mikkelson had used plagiarized material from different news sources in 54 articles between 2015 and 2019 in an effort to increase website traffic. Mikkelson also published plagiarized material under a pseudonym, "Jeff Zarronandia". The BuzzFeed inquiry prompted Snopes to launch an internal review of Mikkelson's articles and to retract 60 of them the day the BuzzFeed story appeared. Mikkelson admitted to committing "multiple serious copyright violations" and apologized for "serious lapses in judgment". He was suspended from editorial duties during the investigation but remained an officer and stakeholder in the company.

Change of ownership On September 16, 2022, David Mikkelson stepped down as CEO and was succeeded by shareholder and board member Chris Richmond. Richmond and fellow shareholder Drew Schoentrup together acquired 100% of the company, ending the ownership dispute which began in 2017. Snopes employees announced their intent to unionize in July 2025 with the Media Guild of the West. The Snopes Guild plans to represent about 10 eligible editorial staff members.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Snopes

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Snopes claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Snopes before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Snopes ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Snopes

In research: Snopes appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Snopes in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Snopes is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1994 establishments in California, Fact-checking websites, Internet properties established in 1994, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Snopes outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Snopes in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Snopes means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Snopes out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Snopes in simple terms?

Snopes (), formerly known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a "well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors" on the Internet.

Why does Snopes matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Snopes?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Snopes.