Snopes is at it again. This time they have targeted the Satirical site the Babylon Bee. If you haven’t heard of them before this is how the site describes itself.
The Babylon Bee is the world’s best satire site, totally inerrant in all its truth claims. We write satire about Christian stuff, political stuff, and everyday life.
The Babylon Bee was created ex nihilo on the eighth day of the creation week, exactly 6,000 years ago. We have been the premier news source through every major world event, from the Tower of Babel and the Exodus to the Reformation and the War of 1812. We focus on just the facts, leaving spin and bias to other news sites like CNN and Fox News.
If you would like to complain about something on our site, take it up with God.
Unlike other satire sites, everything we post is 100% verified by Snopes.com.
Despite the Babylon Bee VERY CLEARLY being a humourous satirical site the left-leaning fact-checking site Snopes fact-checked a Babylon Bee article as if it was a real news article. After the Babylon Bee was forced to send Snopes a demand letter from their attorneys Snopes eventually went back and edited their defamatory fact-check, revising some of the language where they had suggested that the satirical site was deliberately misleading people.
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. From their view, we’re just pretenders, using the label “satire” to our advantage so we can hoodwink the masses. 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.
On top of all this, they’re now promoting a survey that suggests satire is causing too much confusion, posing “a problem for democracy.” The research conducted for this survey appears to be shoddy at best. But that didn’t stop Snopes from using it to advance the narrative that the Babylon Bee’s content is deceptive and problematic.
This attack on Satire is just like the ever-tightening noose that is suffocating comedy. Free speech and humour are under attack from many sides. How long will it be before both satire and comedy are banned just in case someone is offended or because the occasional person may take a satirical piece at face value? The real “problem for our democracy” is not humourous sites like the Babylon Bee but humourless, authoritarian sites like Snopes who want to tightly control what we can and cannot say.