The following is yet another great moment in "fact-checking" that we've come to expect from the usual suspects.
A claim started to circulate on the internet which was an obvious attempt to blame Elon Musk for the missing submersible. The question Snopes asked and answered was this one: "Was the Missing Titanic Submersible Relying on Satellites from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Communicate?"
Starlink is a subsidiary of SpaceX, which Elon Musk runs. https://t.co/0MORTIgqfJ
— snopes.com (@snopes) June 21, 2023
Snopes' original ruling on that claim was "true":
The Snopes tweet then earned a Community Note from Twitter:
— StewMama✈ Cari- Radically Moderate (@StewMama71) June 21, 2023
Elon Musk and others joined Community Notes in calling BS on the original Snopes rating of "true":
Starlink doesn’t offer satellite 📡 internet connections for deep sea water vessels, it’s also not even possible underwater, only surface buoyant ships use Starlink. This is how we know communication with the diving vessel is dark, a Starlink dish on the Oceangate surface ship,…
— K10✨ (@Kristennetten) June 21, 2023
Correct
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 22, 2023
You can’t even run a good psy op
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023
Suing them out of existence would be fun. But they’re doing a good job discrediting themselves so they should just be labeling themselves a parody account at this point.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 21, 2023
There was then a pivot to "unproven":
.@snopes has since updated the status to "Unproven" (which is still misinformation, by the way; it is not physically or scientifically possible for this myth to be true).
— Eric Spencer (@JustEric) June 21, 2023
Here's a snapshot of the original verdict on the Wayback Machine:https://t.co/PjP1Nc3FQF
And finally the full one-eighty was complete:
A pretty remarkable example of the evolution in fact checking:
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) June 22, 2023
A Snopes story switched a claim’s rating from TRUE to FALSE following a Community Note on Twitter.https://t.co/Tx0KMNnpn4https://t.co/IXcFv72YNV pic.twitter.com/CcFjRVjFjK
.@snopes has finally updated the status to "False." Glad I could help. Feel free to reach out in the future if you want to avoid embarrassing yourselves like this again.
— Eric Spencer (@JustEric) June 21, 2023
Well, there it is:
The Snopes article now contains this update:
Since the original publication of this fact check on June 20, 2023, Snopes clarified its rating and text to make clear that — while OceanGate, the company overseeing the submersible's expedition, said it was using Starlink satellites for the trip — the submersible itself was not using the technology to communicate. How, or to what extent, the vessel's mothership was using Starlink to communicate remained unknown.
Wow, from "true" to "unproven" to "false" is quite the pivot!
I love it when disinformation spread by "professional" fact checkers gets exposed by Community Notes.
— EllyKayUSA (@EllyKayUSA) June 21, 2023
https://t.co/H7jQaA1OSo pic.twitter.com/QtFRJ7SGbm
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) June 21, 2023
And the backpedal is complete:
Worth its own tweet. The evolution of a Snopes story. pic.twitter.com/9wmP4zQEac
— Noam Blum 🚡 (@neontaster) June 21, 2023
Correction: While OceanGate, the company overseeing the submersible’s expedition, said it was using Starlink — the submersible itself wasn’t communicating via those satellites. We regret the original version of this post that did not make that clear.https://t.co/yCtwBzTatP
— snopes.com (@snopes) June 21, 2023
Another day, another example of "fact-checkers" covering themselves in more journalistic glory.
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