The Babylon Bee Hits Back At Snopes For Biased Attacks

Left-wing "fact-checking" site Snopes has an undeniable bias against The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site it has routinely so...

Left-wing "fact-checking" site Snopes has an undeniable bias against The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site it has routinely sought to deplatform and delegitimize by issuing bogus "False" ratings for articles the Bee clearly and expressly bills as comedic fake news.

Last week, Snopes escalated its attack on The Babylon Bee by publishing a reportjustifying its "fact-checking" harassment of the comedy site by suggesting that Republicans are too stupid to know the difference between fake news and satire:

Our study on misinformation and social media lasted six months. Every two weeks, we identified 10 of the most shared fake political stories on social media, which included satirical stories. Others were fake news reports meant to deliberately mislead readers.

We then asked a representative group of over 800 Americans to tell us if they believed claims based on those trending stories. By the end of the study, we had measured respondents’ beliefs about 120 widely shared falsehoods.

Satirical articles like those found on The Babylon Bee frequently showed up in our survey. In fact, stories published by The Bee were among the most shared factually inaccurate content in almost every survey we conducted. On one survey, The Babylon Bee had articles relating to five different falsehoods.

For each claim, we asked people to tell us whether it was true or false and how confident they were in their belief. Then we computed the proportion of Democrats and of Republicans who described these statements as “definitely true.”

If we zero in on The Babylon Bee, a few patterns stand out.

The report came just weeks after the Bee recruited legal representation in response to Snopes publishing an allegedly defamatory piece accusing the outlet of using satire as a "ruse" to deliberately mislead its readers — a charge that Snopes has, notably, never once leveled against the openly satirical site The Onion.

On Monday, The Babylon Bee said in a Facebook post that Snopes has not relented in its harassment and has even doubled down on the attacks by creating a "Labeled Satire" rating.

 

"Snopes is at it again. We had hoped that a demand letter from our attorneys would prompt changes. And it seemed to. Snopes did go back and edit their defamatory fact-check, revising some of the language that suggested we were deliberately misleading people," The Babylon Bee said. "However, they've subsequently published a new rating for satire called 'Labeled Satire.' Their explanation of this rating says the label 'satire' is often misapplied to content that doesn't really qualify as satire — and Snopes has made it clear that they feel our content falls into that category."

Indeed, Snopes defined the "Labeled Satire" rating as a means to reflect the content creator's description of the material, rather than to serve as an objective label.

 

"This rating indicates that a claim is derived from content described by its creator and/or the wider audience as satire," says Snopes of the rating. "Not all content described by its creator or audience as ‘satire’ necessarily constitutes satire, and this rating does not make a distinction between 'real' satire and content that may not be effectively recognized or understood as satire despite being labeled as such."

Translation: We determine what is and what is not satire — the actual creators of the satire be damned.

"From their view, we're just pretenders, using the label 'satire' to our advantage so we can hoodwink the masses," The Babylon Bee continued. "It's really extraordinary, especially since they've acknowledged in private communication with us that there is a 'clear distinction' between our satire and intentionally misleading fake news. For some reason, they refuse to acknowledge the clear distinction in their published articles."