Among Facebook’s appointed arbiters of “fake news” is Snopes.com, which has been criticized by conservatives for a left-leaning bias and admits it has no standard procedure for fact-checking.
One of Snopes’ leading fact-checkers is a former sex-and-fetish blogger who described her routine as smoking pot and posting to Snopes.com, and the company now is embroiled in a legal dispute between its former married founders that includes accusations the CEO used company money for prostitutes.
“This is Facebook’s high journalistic standard,” commented Pamela Geller, an author and blogger who focuses on the politically incorrect subject of Islam and terrorism.
“What a joke,” she wrote on her blog. “Facebook’s fact checkers will be used to censor and ban conservative perspectives, not to distinguish truth from falsehood. Everyone knows that.”
The Daily Mail of London reported one of Snopes.com’s main contributors is disclosed to be a former sex-blogger who called herself ‘Vice Vixen.'”
Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson told WND in a story published Friday she thinks the recent uproar over “fake news” is a “narrative-driven propaganda campaign.”
“I think there’s an agenda to censor the news as opposed to actually trying to eliminate fake news,” she said.
Facebook has asked a number of organizations, along with Snopes.com, to arbitrate on items Facebook staff think may not be genuine and decide whether they should be marked as “disputed.”
The others include ABC News, the Associated Press and Politifact.com.
A DailyMail.com investigation found that Snopes.com’s founders, former husband and wife David and Barbara Mikkelson, are embroiled in a lengthy and bitter legal dispute in the wake of their divorce.
He has since remarried to a former escort and porn actress who is one of the site’s staff members.
Barbara Mikkelson accuses her ex-husband of embezzlement while David claims she took millions from their joint accounts and bought property in Las Vegas.
One of Snopes.com’s lead fact-checkers is Kim LaCapria, the Daily Mail reported, who has also been a sex-and-fetish blogger who went by the pseudonym ‘Vice Vixen.’
Her blog had “a specific focus on naughtiness, sin, carnal pursuits, and general hedonism and bonne vivante-ery.”
Her day-off activities she said on another blog were: “played scrabble, smoked pot, and posted to Snopes.'”
“That’s what I did on my day “on,” too,” she added.
David Mikkelson told the the Daily Mail that Snopes does not have a “standardized procedure” for fact-checking “since the nature of this material can vary widely.”
He said the process of fact-checking “‘involves multiple stages of editorial oversight, so no output is the result of a single person’s discretion.”
Snopes has no formal requirements for fact-checkers, he told the London paper, because the variety of the work “would be difficult to encompass in any single blanket set of standards.”
Mikkelson has denied that Snopes takes any political position, but the Daily Mail noted his new wife ran for U.S. congress in Hawaii as a Libertarian in 2004.
During the campaign she handed out “Re-Defeat Bush” cards and condoms stamped with the slogan “Don’t get screwed again.”
“Let’s face it, I am an unlikely candidate. I fully admit that I am a courtesan,” she wrote on her campaign website.