https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snopes#Change_of_ownership
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Richmond_(entrepreneur)#Snopes.com_lawsuit
https://www.wired.com/story/snopes-and-the-search-for-facts-in-a-post-fact-world/
https://www.courthousenews.com/fact-checker-snopes-owners-accused-corporate-subterfuge/
https://web.archive.org/web/20220923232402/https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/snopes-co-owners-acquire-remaining-140000348.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovrn_Holdings
Snopes.com has been thought of as a reputable and trusted site for fact-checking.
From 2016 to 2022, the original mom-and-pop owners were sued out of their company in what was described as a “hostile takeover”.
Snopes is now owned as a for-profit “programmatic advertising business”.
This has the same energy as the folks running around doing a disinfo op on Wikipedia. None of this is true and either OP wildly misunderstood the situation or they’re intentionally being deceitful.
I’d assume good faith—misunderstanding. It’s quite easy and sound to arrive at this interpretation if you forget that the current owners sold off their ad company a year before getting 100% control of Snopes.
In casual conversation IRL, if someone made this claim, I’d assume good faith. Or even in a reply to an existing discussion of Snopes. But OP decided to make a post without verifying their information and then went through and defended that take in the comments when people explained the actual facts to them. This wasn’t done in good faith, it would appear.
Interesting analysis of perceived motives between interaction environments; thank you.
I am glad for all the discussion in, and response to, this thread.