The Dumbest Snopes "Fact-Check" Of All Time?

Snopes repeatedly said the COVID-19 lab leak theory couldn’t be true.

At least five Snopes “fact-checkers”, including the founder of “the definitive fact-checking” site, pushed disinformation that the COVID-19 pandemic could not have possibly originated from a lab. Astonishingly, even though all the false “fact-checks” are still up on Snopes without correction, one Snopes “fact-checker”, David Emery, tried to claim in a thread with comedian Adam Carolla that, “Snopes didn’t say the lab leak theory couldn’t be true.”

Last week, the Snopes writer and editor with “25 years of experience fact-checking” got hammered for a now admittedly false “fact-check” that claimed President Biden did not embarrassingly wear a construction helmet incorrectly, despite Snopes’ own photographic and expert sources telling him otherwise.

“How dumb are these people?” I wondered. I’ve documented the fact-checkers getting facts wrong for a while now but I don’t know if I’ve ever found anything quite as dumb as what I found from the Snopes “hard hat” fact-checker David Emery who goes by “@Debunker” on X (formerly known as Twitter).

In a response to comedian Adam Carolla's sarcastic post about self-proclaimed “fact-checkers” like Snopes, Emery appears completely removed from reality, when he challenged Carolla and his followers to, “Name the fact-checkers who said COVID could not have come from a lab”.

The arrogant ignorance of this Snopes fact-checker is truly something to behold. Before the Biden administration finally acknowledged the possibility of a lab origin in 2021, virtually all the self-proclaimed news “fact-checkers”, including The Associated Press, CNN, USA Today, PolitiFact, New York Times, Vox, NPR, BBC, Washington Post, Russia Today, and the World Health Organization dismissed a lab origin, typically identifying the theory as a “false” “debunked” “conspiracy theory”.

How many head injuries did Emery endure to miss all this? Adding insult to injury, the Snopes fact-check editor delusionally proclaims that, “Snopes didn’t say the lab leak theory couldn’t be true.”

Not only did Snopes say the lab leak theory couldn’t be true, but Snopes did so repeatedly in at least nine separate “fact-check” articles by four other Snopes “fact-checkers”, including the founder of Snopes! And at least one of the “fact-checks” was shared by Emery himself on Twitter.

The April 2020 Snopes “fact-check” by Dan Evon called the lab leak theory “misinformation” that was “already debunked”.

Throughout the early months of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic, we repeatedly came across variations of the claim that COVID-19 was manufactured at a laboratory in Wuhan, China. While dozens of medical experts have already debunked this idea (the evidence indicates that the virus evolved naturally), this bit of misinformation continued to spread on social media.

Evon dismissed the lab theory in several other “fact-checks” as well, calling the mere possibility “illogical”, “evidence-free”, and “nothing more than baseless conspiracy theories,” ultimately ruling that the idea that the virus was “developed” or “manufactured” in any way was totally “False”.

In another Snopes “fact-check”, Snopes “investigative journalist” and “senior writer” from Johns Hopkins, Alex Kasprak, also claimed it was a known fact that the virus had evolved from “natural selection, not bioengineering.”

Later in April 2020, the founder of Snopes himself, David Mikkelson, wrote two Snopes “fact checks” of his own, further claiming that a lab origin was an “unfounded” and “false notion”, concluding again that “SARS-CoV-2 virus evolved or mutated and was not bioengineered”.

In September 2020, Snopes contributor Madison Dapcevich reported that claims of a lab origin were, “false” and “nearly impossible”, further dismissing a lab origin as a wild “conspiracy theory” four separate times.

The “rigorous scientific research” Dapcevich cited as “proving” COVID-19 came from nature was the widely cited and fraudulent “Proximal Origin” paper.

So when it comes to the most impactful stories, ultimately Snopes doesn’t check facts, they check narratives, and as the official narrative shifts so do their “facts”. This isn’t fact-checking, this is government stenography.

By June 2021, after the Biden administration said it would formally investigate the possibility of a lab leak, Snopes finally acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic could have been the result of a man-made virus that escaped from a Wuhan lab, contradicting their previous year’s reporting that the virus had come from nature.

In other words, only after the government gave the public permission to ask questions did Snopes suddenly allow itself to acknowledge uncertainty and be skeptical like a real fact-checker should.

We don’t know how the virus arrived in Wuhan, how its sequence evolved to allow human infection, and under what conditions it infected the first people who crossed its path

It’s been over three years after Snopes itself acknowledged a lab leak origin is possible, and yet Snopes has still not corrected or updated their own “fact-checks” claiming that it isn’t.

A fact-checker that (1) fails to exercise basic skepticism, (2) fails to fact-check perhaps the most impactful story of our lifetimes, (3) fails to correct the error, and then (4) pretends like they had never been wrong in the first place, is not at all credible. And yet NewsGuard gives Snopes “a perfect 100/100 credibility rating” with the “highest of editorial standards”, revealing just how uncredible the entire fact-checking industry is.

All of the Snopes authors who spread COVID-19-origin disinformation are still at Snopes, with one exception. After producing work for Snopes that shows he can’t be trusted, Dan Evon now has a job teaching us all what news sources to trust, as Senior Manager for the News Literacy Project, a national education nonprofit to “teach students & the public how to know what to believe in the digital age.”

To quote the Snopes editor who inspired this whole deep dive, "Oh the dipshittery."