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Facebook Used Snopes ‘Fact Check’ To Threaten Christian Satire Site By ‘Mistake’

REUTERS/Toby Melville

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Anders Hagstrom Justice Reporter
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Facebook mistakenly threatened Christian satire site The Babylon Bee with demonetization and reduced viewership after the left-leaning Snopes website “fact checked” one of its blatantly satirical articles Thursday.

Snopes fact checked a Bee article titled “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication,” and found that it was false. Facebook then used the fact check to warn Babylon Bee Founder and editor Adam Ford that publishing more “disputed info” would result in demonetization and reduced viewership.

“Snopes has ‘fact-checked’ several of our articles before,” Ford told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “But this is the first time Facebook has used that to threaten us with reduced reach and demonetization.”

Snopes acknowledged that the Bee’s article was satire, but claimed the fact check was justified because “some readers missed that aspect of the article and interpreted it literally.” Snopes has a  long history of dubious fact checks and has targeted the Bee’s satire 13 times and The Onion’s satire 17 times.

A Snopes article attempting to discredit a Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group news story revealing that millions of Department of State tax dollars were sent to a charity created by Secretary of State John Kerry’s daughter was also loaded with factual errors and omissions.

Snopes also employs failed liberal bloggers to do its fact checking. Snopes’ main political fact-checker is a writer named Kim Lacapria. Before writing for Snopes, Lacapria wrote for Inquisitr, a blog that is known for publishing fake quotes and even downright hoaxes as much as anything else.

Facebook apologized and claimed its warning to the Bee was a mistake.

“There’s a difference between false news and satire,” Facebook said in a statement to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “This was a mistake and should not have been rated false in our system. It’s since been corrected and won’t count against the domain in any way.”

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