"Earlier this week I wrote a piece about the fact-checking website Snopes and its bizarre and seemingly hostile approach to the Babylon Bee, a website for conservative Christian satire.
One of its fact checks last year caused Facebook to threaten the Bee with sanctions, and a fact check last week was so clearly flawed that Snopes substantially corrected and clarified its post.
The issue, as I saw it, was that the controversy was yet another example of how ideological blindness was causing previously respected institutions to throw away their credibility through partisan misjudgments and partisan acts.
Well, today BuzzFeed covered the controversy, and its report is something else.
First, here is how it frames the story:
The Babylon Bee, a self-proclaimed Christian satire site with half a million followers on Facebook, has accused fact-checking site Snopes.com of unfairly debunking some of its satirical articles as fake news. The accusation has jump-started a conspiracy theory that fact-checking websites are targeting conservative humor in an effort to de-platform right-wing publishers.
“Conspiracy theory” is a strong accusation.
What’s the evidence?
But that’s not a conspiracy theory.
Snopes did write a flawed post, by its own admission.
Moreover, there’s a curious omission from the story (at least the version that’s online as I type this post).
Although the writer links to the Bee’s statement against Snopes that provides the background of the Bee’s concerns, he fails to note some rather important context.
Last year Facebook actually threatened to take action against the Bee because of a Snopes fact check.
So the “conspiracy theory” I suppose is that the Bee is concerned that something that happened once could possibly happen again.
Here’s Facebook’s warning to the Bee from last year..."
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