Can Snopes Be Trusted On Health Issues?

Health Impact News Editor

The past few weeks we have had quite a few people comment on various Facebook pages that certain stories we wrote were “proven false” by Snopes.com, forcing us to take a closer look at just who Snopes.com is, and what exactly they are supposedly finding “false” regarding our articles.

Who is Snopes.com?

Snopes.com is a website run by a husband and wife team named Barbara and David Mikkelson who live in California. They are one of the more popular and often quoted “urban legends” websites on the Internet. You can read what they say about themselves here. There is nothing written on their “About Us” page listing their credentials as self-appointed Internet Sheriffs, or how they go about researching the topics they purport to disprove. It would seem that anyone with the same amount of time and use of a search engine like Google.com could pretty much do the same things they do, and in fact there are very many competing “urban legend” websites that do publish very similar articles as the Mikkelsons write.

Can We Trust Snopes.com on Health Issues?

Since Health Impact News is all about publishing alternative health news that the mainstream media usually will not publish, this is the area where we are most often being confronted with articles originating from Mr. and Mrs. Mikkelson. So let’s take a look at two of our most recent topics we have covered where readers claimed that Barbara and David have proven us “false.”

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge

On August 21, 2014 Health Impact News published an article on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: Do You Know What You Are Supporting? We were one of the first sources to publish publicly available information directly from the ALS Association’s website documenting just where the ALS Association spends their funds. The article soon went viral, and within 1 week had over 800,000 views.

So it wasn’t too long after this that Facebook users started commenting that Snopes.com had proven our article as “FALSE.” I thought to myself, how can it be “false,” when all the data we shared was directly from the ALS Association’s website and publicly posted tax returns?? So I looked up their article on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and began to learn how they operate.

A search on their site found an article that was listed with the title: Where Do ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Donations Go?.  However, when I clicked on the link, that title did not appear in the article (it appears the Mikkelson’s frequently change their articles as they find new information.) The claim listed as “false” in the article was this one: “Most of the $100 million raised from ALS ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ donations won’t go to ALS-related research and services. ”

This is not a claim our article makes (note how they added the word “services” to “research”), and they did not reference our article at all, but rather “Collected via e-mail.”

I noticed they use this vague reference to “Collected via email” for sources to many of their “urban legends” they “prove false,” rather than linking to an actual documented source where one can check the claims for themselves, such as our article. As the Mikkelsons then proceeded to “prove false” this claim they created, it gives the appearance that all such similar claims must be false also.

This is a typical way of debate using a fallacy called “setting up a straw man to knock down.” It is obviously much easier to refute something is actually false when you define the claim, and completely ignore the premises and issues that are the real issues. It appears that this is exactly what the Mikkelsons did in this article about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.

The second important thing to consider when reading about supposed proofs of false claims is who is being quoted as the source of information. In our article on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, every single fact we presented regarding ALS funding, spending, and salaries by the ALS Association was backed up by data directly on the primary source, the ALS Association’s website, with direct links to the pages where the facts were contained. The Mikkelsons, on the other hand, mainly used a secondary source, a service called the “Charity Navigator,” who gave high marks to the ALS Association.

So in the end, nothing at all that the Mikkelsons wrote about their own opinions on the ALS Association and the Ice Bucket Challenge proved anything false in our article, but they sure fooled a lot of people into thinking so.

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