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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

There was also the recent example of the fact check "The Democratic party has tried to impeach every Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower."

Even though the Democrats have tried to impeach 5 out of 6 presidents, this was labelled as "Mostly False".

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Your criticism here seems intellectually dishonest to me. The claim is mostly false. Democrats != The Democratic Party. Based on that, the handful of Democrats that attempted to file articles without the support of the rest of the party don't really support the claim that "The Democratic party has tried to impeach" and, as mentioned in the article, one of those was a bipartisan attempt but still counts.

That means that, at best, 2 of the 6 examples count as "The Democratic party" and, at worst, 3 of the 6 if you count Nixon.

If you read the article, the original claim was "Democrats" have tried to impeach every republican president since Eisenhower. It was Snopes that changed it to "The Democratic Party".

Even without that change, the claim is false, though. The claim says that Democrats have attempted to impeach every Republican President. That's false.

Additionally, by the criteria you're suggesting, I would wonder then, by extension, if Republicans have attempted to impeach every Democratic President if the only criteria is that some Republican filed for it as opposed to it being a party decision.

But this is exactly the tactic Snopes uses to be able to flip a fact check answer.

In this case, the original claim could have been "most" or "5 out of 6", and changing it to "all" is an easy way to post that big red x.

Except that's not true. The article links to the image in question which shows the word "every" used in it. Unless you have evidence (like a link from archive.org) that shows that they changed that image, they're not using any tactics. They're using the claim that was sent to them.

I meant it only as an illustrative example, in this case, of how easy it is to flip the answer. I don't know the specifics of this particular claim.

They are not always using the claim sent to them, and they've been busted dozens of times for changing a claim, instead of changing the result. It's selectively choosing which "original" to use.

For actual cases I've already posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516623

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516762

>they've been busted dozens of times for changing a claim

You keep repeating this claim over and over without any evidence whatsoever that this is happening. Even the cases you've posted have no indication that anything was changed to re-frame a result and yet you keep arguing that they're selectively choosing the question and, on top of that, all of them include an image of the original claim, irrespective of what they chose as the title of their page.

If only Snopes didn't ask archive. org to scrub the entire site.

I wonder why a trusted, transparent site would do that...

>If only Snopes didn't ask archive. org to scrub the entire site.

As with almost all of your other claims, a citation or source is needed.

Edit: On top of that, there are several other archive sites that do, in fact, have Snopes articles linked. So, you tell me... why would Snopes "go after" one archive site and not another?

> Sorry.

> This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/snopes.com

The Wayback Machine only excludes sites upon request.

Most articles aren't archived or have also been scrubbed. Or only have a single recent version archived. For instance archive.is has entries for maybe 2000 out of the 10s of thousands Snopes articles. Of those, less than 5% have multiple archived versions.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/*

This isn't exactly the type of site I'd usually reference, but this woman recorded quite a few page delta's about gmo food and Monsanto, and the Snopes pages getting edited after large ad buys by the company.

https://foodbabe.com/do-you-trust-snopes-you-wont-after-read...

If you treat it as a binary claim, then you could argue it is false. A more accurate description would be "Mostly True" as 5 out of 6 is a large majority.

Republicans may well have tried to impeach every Democrat president. I have no idea. If that is the case, then I hope Snopes has an article fact checking it in a fair way.

Er, I read through the article and I'd agree with Snopes on this one. They present a pretty good argument. If you change the claim to 5/6 it becomes technically correct (the best kind of correct!), but the nuance that Snopes presents in the article is extremely compelling for why it is mostly false. Three of those 5 impeachments didn't even make it out of committee to go in front of the house, they were only introduced (and any rep can introduce anything crazy they'd like, including articles of impeachment) and one of the impeachments was Nixon which had bipartisan support.

The problem is, you can no longer trust Snopes to ask the "original" question. They've been caught changing the question at least dozens of times to be able to not change a wrong answer.

That's not as much of an issue anymore, since they just change the question from the start now.

Link to article

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dems-impeach-gop-president...

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