A meme on social media claims to show two photos of the CEO of fact-checking Snopes meeting businessman George Soros, along with the claim that Soros “and the DNC” are Snopes’ only client.
The meme also claims that fellow fact-checking website FactCheck.org “exposed” Snopes as an “extremely liberal propaganda site”.
An example can be seen below.
100% FAKE FACT-CHECKING SITE
In 2009 FactCheck.org exposed Snopes.com as an extremely liberal propaganda site with an agenda to discredit anything that appears to be conservative. Snopes has no employees and its owner has zero investigative experience and facebook has hired him to 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!
Long running theories that assert fact-checking website Snopes.com is secretly funded by the Democratic National Party or by high profile Democratic businessmen such as George Soros are nothing new. And rumours or memes that assert the following typically lack any evidence to support such assertions, and/or can be easily debunked. Like the meme above. Despite the many claims made in the meme, most of easily dismissible. We outline them below.
Do the two photos show Snopes CEO meeting George Soros? No.
The photo on the left shows George Soros meeting Hungarian Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai, likely taken in September 2009 when Bajnai made an official visit to the United States. The photo on the right was first uploaded in 2006 and shows tech entrepreneur Andrew Baron meeting George Soros. Neither men have any discernible connection with Snopes. The Snopes CEO is David Mikkelson, who is in neither photo.
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Did FactCheck.org “expose” Snopes in 2009? No.
There is no literature or content that we could find that could support this claim. FactCheck.org did write about Snopes, and they did so in 2009, but their article (here) could only be reasonably interpreted as a positive one. The article by FactCheck was debunking a [different] claim targeting Snopes, and it dismissed many false claims of bias directed at the site.
Does Snopes have zero employees? No.
While we cannot comment on the type of employment Snopes has with its writers and contributors, we do know there are several individuals who regularly write for Snopes. A list of them can be seen on the Snopes page here and most of them can be easily found on social media.
Facebook has hired Snopes to fact check the news? Outdated
Facebook has attempted to cull the visibility of fake news on its platform in a variety of different ways. One such method was teaming up with a number of fact checking websites that are certified by the non-partisan Fact-Checking network Poynter. This did for some time include Snopes, but Snopes has since stopped working with Facebook in this way since early 2019.
Soros and DNC are Snopes only client?
It is difficult to determine what the meme means by “client”, but there is simply no evidence available (or offered) to support it.
To conclude, all of the assertions made in the meme has be demonstrated to be false, and we don’t recommend circulating it.