Snopes

Snopes is a fact-checking website. By its own account it “got its start in 1994, investigating urban legends, hoaxes and folklore,” and it now publishes fact checks and original reporting. It describes its practice as always linking to and documenting its sources “so readers can independently make up their own minds about the truth.”

Ownership

Snopes.com is owned and operated under Snopes, Inc., which the site describes as a wholly owned subsidiary of Snopes Media Group, Inc. Snopes Media Group is owned by Chris Richmond (60 percent) and Drew Schoentrup (40 percent). Snopes is a member of the International Fact-Checking Network and publishes an IFCN complaints route alongside its own contact details.

Rating System

Snopes publishes definitions for each rating it applies. As revised on 7 May 2026 the scale runs True, Mostly True, Mixture, Mostly False and False, distinguished by whether the primary elements of a claim are demonstrably true or false and whether ancillary details are accurate. Beyond that scale it uses labels for particular failure modes: Fake for media manipulated or generated by CGI or AI tools; Miscaptioned for authentic media whose accompanying description falsely states its origin, context or meaning; Correct Attribution and Incorrect Attribution for quoted material; Outdated where later events have made the original rating irrelevant; and Scam and Legit for offers and initiatives. The site states that the previous rating system is archived rather than removed.

Sourcing Note

Several claims from the previous version of this page are removed. The reach line “20+ million monthly visits at peak election cycles” has no accessible source. The founding attribution to David and Barbara Mikkelson does not appear on the pages cited here. So too the account of Snopes joining Facebook’s third-party fact-checking program in 2016, “briefly paus[ing]” it in 2019 and “later resuming participation” — the last of these is a specific factual assertion for which no source could be found, and the current about page describes no platform partnership at all. Claims about collaboration with Google, Microsoft and YouTube on misinformation research, about union negotiations, and about supplying debunk data to academic researchers are removed for the same reason. The fact-checks-for connection to Facebook has been removed with them.