I’m in a conversation with someone who is adamant that Snopes is politically biased and owned by George Soros. Obviously it’s nonsense but the claim seems to be all over the web on right-wing sites. Sometimes they say he supports it indirectly through left-wing orgs; sometimes they say he owns it. Snopes adresses this: Of course they’re not going to believe this since they don’t trust , And by the way, Snopes himself used to occasionally contribute to the alt.fan.cecil-adams newsgroup. I recall specifically a thread about the monetarist interpretation of The Wizard of Oz, in which I was wrong and he was right. In Snopes’ old newsgroup postings, sometimes the most entertaining part was his .sig., I think you’re suffering from confirmation bias. We have plenty of weird threads started by someone who posts once and disappears. No one remembers them because they didn’t stick around long enough to make an impression. But they aren’t all trolls. Not weird, but provocative. That is, a thread designed to get others to object to the topic , The Darwin Awards were a big part of social media in The Aughts and as recently as 2020. Many News publications published odd news and suggested a Darwin Award. The web site hasn’t been updated since 2022. I know the web site came after the early mentions in the 1990’s. I’m not sure which social media platform first coined the term. It was used at the SDMB a lot in the early days. Did , The other night on the news, the talking head made a reference to Snopes, the urban legend debunking site. The odd thing was, she pronounced it, “Snow Peas”. I had always imagined it rhymed with “Popes”, though I have only seen it in print and never heard anyone pronounce it before. What say you; “Snow Peas” or rhymes with “Popes”?, Snopes and other sources claim that the legend has been around since the 1930s (“The rumor that Tootsie Pop wrappers featuring an Indian can be redeemed for free candy has dogged the Tootsie Roll company since Indian on Tootsie Roll wrapper shortly after the introduction of the chewy-centered lollipops in 1931”), but the earliest actual .