Snopes

1990s

In 1994, David and Barbara Mikkelson created an urban folklore web site that would become Snopes.com.^[8][9][10] Snopes was an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends, which mainly presented search results of user discussions based at first on their contributions to the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban (AFU) where they had been active.^[11] The site grew to encompass a wide range of subjects and became a resource to which Internet users began submitting pictures and stories of questionable veracity. According to the Mikkelsons, Snopes predated the search engine concept of fact-checking via search results.^[12] David Mikkelson had originally adopted the username "Snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner) in AFU.^{[13][14][15][16]}

2000s

In 2002, the site had become known well enough that a television pilot by writer-director Michael Levine called Snopes: Urban Legends was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host; however, it did not air on major networks.^[14]

2010s

By 2010, the site was attracting seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month.^[17][18] By mid-2014, Barbara had not written for Snopes "in several years",^[3] and David hired users from Snopes.com's message board to assist him in running the site. The Mikkelsons divorced around that time.^[3][19] Christopher Richmond and Drew Schoentrup became part owners in July 2016 with the purchase of Barbara Mikkelson's share by the internet media management company Proper Media.^[20]

On March 9, 2017, David Mikkelson terminated the brokering agreement with Proper Media, which was also the company that provided Snopes with web development, hosting, and advertising support.^[21] The move prompted Proper Media to stop remitting advertising revenue and to file a lawsuit in May. In late June, Bardav—the company founded by David and Barbara Mikkelson in 2003 to own and operate snopes.com—started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to continue operations.^[22] They raised $500,000 in 24 hours.^[23] Later in August, a judge ordered Proper Media to disburse advertising revenues to Bardav while the case was pending.^[24]

In July 2018, Snopes abruptly terminated its contract with Managing Editor Brooke Binkowski, with no explanation.^{[clarification needed]} By the time Snopes co-founder and CEO David Mikkelson confirmed the termination to her, the situation was still not clear.^[25] In early 2019, Snopes announced that it had acquired the website OnTheIssues.org, and is "hard at work modernizing its extensive archives".^[26] OnTheIssues is a website that seeks to "present all the relevant evidence, assess how strongly each piece supports or opposes a position, and summarize it with an average" in order to "provide voters with reliable information on candidates' policy positions".^[27]

In 2018 and 2019, Snopes fact-checked several articles from The Babylon Bee, a satirical website, rating them "False". The decision resulted in Facebook adding warnings to links to those articles shared on its site.^[28][29][30] Snopes added a new rating called "Labeled Satire" to identify satirical stories.^[31] Also in 2019, Snopes was embroiled in legal disputes with Proper Media, with a court case scheduled for spring 2020. By then Proper Media had become a co-owner of Bardav through acquiring Barbara Mikkelson's half-interest share, intending to take overall ownership of Snopes for its own "portfolio of media sites". The move failed as David Mikkelson had no intention to sell his share.^[32]

2020s