You may have read that Bigfoot was found dead on a lake shore in New Mexico this summer. He wasn't. You can learn about that hoax here from the myth-busting and fact-checking site Snopes. You may have heard NASA predicted the Earth will endure 15 straight days of darkness this fall. It didn't. Snopes has that covered too — debunking the claim when it first appeared in 2015 and again in May when it resurfaced. What isn't a hoax is that the future of Snopes, one of the nation's first digital fact-checking initiatives, is in doubt. Ownership of the site is the focus of a sharply contested legal battle between its founder, David Mikkelson, and a small digital outfit called Proper Media, which had an arrangement to manage advertising and some other elements of Snopes' site. (It has similar agreements with such digital publishers as Salon, Raw Story and the Daily Dot.) Mikkelson tells NPR that he's been cut off from all revenues and has launched online crowdfunding appeals; he says he's
↧
