Another Snopes fact-check was quickly derailed by facts, resulting in the alleged fact-checking organization completely reversing their initial verdict.
Last week Biden was pictured during a visit with union workers in Wisconsin wearing a construction hard hat backwards, which was widely spread and mocked on social media.
In a desperate attempt to save Biden from further embarrassment, the liberal arts majors at Snopes decided to embarrass themselves instead by claiming that everyone else’s eyes were simply broken.The President’s bipartisan infrastructure bill: ALL BEER, NO FOAM pic.twitter.com/dYi0J6vS4u
— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) January 25, 2024
“The photo is genuine. And it does look, at first glance, like Biden was wearing that hard hat backwards. But after comparing it to other photos and videos of the same event, we were forced to reach the opposite conclusion: The hat on Biden's head was facing forward, bill to the front, not backward,” Snopes initially claimed.
After failing to convince anyone, apparently including themselves, Snopes removed that passage from the “fact-check,” revised it, added a three-paragraph long editor’s note ot he beginning of it, and then changed their rating of the claim that Biden wore a hard hat backwards to "true.”
Snopes’ editor hilariously blamed the “error” on confusion about what the words “backward” and “forward” mean; “We received a ton of comments in a very short time challenging our assumption that wearing a hard hat ‘backwards’ means wearing it with the brim facing to the rear, and ‘forwards’ means wearing it brim to the front. On the basis of that assumption, we originally rated the claim that Biden was wearing a hard hat backwards as false,” they wrote.
Snopes admits that their critics were correct, and then pretended to be thankful their damage control propaganda got corrected, concluding “...the claim "President Joe Biden wore a hard hat backwards during a photo op with union construction workers in Superior, Wisconsin" is true, and this fact check has been re-rated as such. Thanks to all who argued on behalf of this correction.”
This isn’t the first time Snopes has had to reverse a ruling, and it’ll hardly be the last. Just last June Snopes ran an article headlined “Was the Missing Titanic Submersible Relying on Satellites from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Communicate?” and rated the claim “True.” They ended up reversing that ruling when they were widely mocked on (and also fact-checked by) Elon Musk’s X platform.
Snopes hasn’t hesitated to embarrass themselves as their fact-checking has become increasingly politicized over the years.
This has included them fact-checking satirical publications like the Babylon Bee. Thanks to the joke police over at Snopes, they’ve informed us that contrary to the Bee’s “reporting,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t really make an appearance on The Price Is Right and guess that everything is free and that Democrats didn’t really force Brett Kavanaugh to subject himself to DNA testing to prove he’s not related to Hitler. Another obviously satirical story rated false by Snopes was headlined “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication.”
Matt Palumbo is the author of Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry and The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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