Snopes ends involvement in Facebook’s fact-checking partnership

“After contributing to that effort for two years, we want to inform our readership that Snopes.com has elected not to renew our partnership with Facebook” Said the Vice President of Operations, Vinny Green, and CEO, David Mikkelsen, of Snopes in an announcement to the site’s community. Snopes
In 2016, Facebook partnered with a number of fact checking sites the included the well-known Snopes.com. After 2 years, snopes has opted not to continue working in this partnership. While originally unpaid for their involvement, Snopes disclosed recieving $100,000 from Facebook for their efforts in 2017, 2018 finances still undisclosed. While this means Snopes will be missing a non-inconsiderable amount of funding with which to invest in their platform, the announcement also stated that the Snopes staff will be working diligently into the 2020 election cycle.
In a report from Poynter, Vinny Green, Snopes vice president of operations, seemed to be dissatisfied with the inefficiency of the system, stating “Do you need fact-checkers to stop and do all this manual work? Or should fake websites just be reported through other means and supply a body of evidence that these people shouldn’t be on your platform because of their nefarious activity?”. While this is all Snopes has said about the interaction, former fact-checkers have voiced concerns and blatant discontent with the platform for some time. In may of 2017, The Guardian reported that not only was Facebook’s system appearing ineffective to those contributing to it, but that some articles flagged as dubious actually saw a dramatic increase in traffic. Ontop of this, fact-checkers said that Facebook didn’t provide them with any meaningful feedback with which to judge their efforts, and that they felt they were being used as little more than PR.
Despite the criticisms, Facebook has stated that they take the issue of fake news and misinformation very seriously, and continue to operate their factchecking program in an effort hinder the proliferation of fake news as the 2020 election cycle begins.