Snopes Debunked the World. Then the World Changed.

For decades, the website’s harsh light of truth rooted out urban legends and conspiracy theories. Does it still work?

Over the past 25 years, the internet has gone from a place of possibility and promise to a dreary slog. Nowhere is this more evident than in the evolution of Snopes.com, a website that once brought a great deal of joy to the internet explorer. Since its founding in 1995 by husband and wife David and Barbara Mikkelson, Snopes’ mission of “debunking” has changed in ways both subtle and inexorable, from targeting urban legends like Bigfoot to unpacking QAnon conspiracy theories. The distinction may seem slight — both are false stories whose appeal lies in their capacity to spread and multiply — but a wide gulf separates their respective impacts. Understanding why the tools that work on urban legends fail to work on conspiracy theories is one way of understanding how our relationship to facts has changed, and it may offer some insight on how to rebuild a world of consensus instead of fear.

Snopes came on the scene at a time when a large portion of the internet consisted of email forwards. One I remember clearly from that era was Bill Gates’ “Beta Test,” an email chain letter that circulated endlessly in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was a simple email, supposedly from Gates, regarding an “e-mail tracing program.” “I am experimenting with this and I need your help,” the email read. “Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 1,000 people everyone on the list will receive $1,000 at my expense.” This email and its subsequent variations were forwarded endlessly, often with the caveat “This is probably fake, but what do I have to lose?”

Around the same time, I was also getting forwards warning of HIV-tipped needles appearing everywhere. They were in Halloween candy, of course. (“Fun-sized” needles, one assumes.) But they appeared in less likely places as well, like in gas pump handles, so that when you went to fill up — boom, your finger was pricked with the kiss of death. I remember well a friend in grad school literally in tears as she explained how a child playing in a ball pit at a McDonald’s had stepped on an HIV-tipped needle someone had purposely buried there. (The child, apparently…