Snopes' fact-checking couple try to unravel Web of lies

No, Kenya did not erect a sign welcoming people to the "birthplace of Barack Obama." No, Wal-Mart did not authorize raids to find illegal immigrants at its stores. No, Social Security numbers are not assigned by race.

David and Barbara Mikkelson investigate such claims — and hundreds of other rumors and legends — on Snopes, one of the most popular fact-checking destinations on the Web.

As the unassuming California couple know better than most, one of the paradoxes of the Internet is that the world's freest access to knowledge also comes with a staggering amount of untruth — from imagined threats of the health-care overhaul to too-easy-to-be-true ways to earn money by (naturally) forwarding an e-mail to 10 friends. Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, once memorably declared that the Web was "a cesspool."

The Mikkelsons for 13 years have acted as arbiters in the Age of Misinformation by answering the central question raised by every chain letter — is this true? — complete with links to further research.

The popularity of Snopes — it attracts 7 million to 8 million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in an unusual position to evaluate digital society's attitudes toward accuracy. They have concluded that people are rather cavalier about facts.

"Rumors are a great source of comfort for people," Barbara Mikkelson said.

Snopes is one of a small handful of sites in the fact-checking business. Brooks Jackson, director of one of the others, the politically oriented FactCheck.org, believes news organizations should be doing more of it.

"The 'news' that is not fit to print gets through to people anyway these days, through 24-hour cable gasbags, partisan talk-radio hosts and chain e-mails, blogs and Web sites such as WorldNetDaily or Daily Kos," Jackson said in an e-mail. "What readers need now, we find, are honest referees who can help ordinary readers sort out fact from fiction."

Even the White House now cites fact-checking sites: It has circulated links and explanations by PolitiFact.com, a St. Petersburg Times project that won a Pulitzer Prize last year for national reporting.

The Mikkelsons did not set out to fact-check the Web's political smears and screeds. The site was started in 1996 as an online encyclopedia of myths and urban legends, building off the couple's hobby. They had met years earlier on a discussion board about urban legends.

David Mikkelson was a dogged researcher of folklore. When he needed to mail letters requesting information, he would use the letterhead of the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, an official-sounding organization he dreamed up. He would investigate origins of classic tall tales, such as the legend of the killer with a prosthetic hook who stalked Lovers' Lane, for a small but devoted online audience.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, users overwhelmed the Mikkelsons with forwarded e-mail claims and editorials about the culprits and the failures of the government to halt the plot, and the couple reluctantly accepted a larger role. They still maintain a thorough list of what they call "Rumors of War."

Snopes became the family's full-time job less than a year later. Advertisements sold by a third-party network cover the $3,000-a-month bandwidth bills, with enough left over for the Mikkelsons to make a living — "despite rumors that we're paid by, depending on your choice, the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee," David Mikkelson said.

Much of the site's resources is spent on investigating political claims, even though the Mikkelsons say politics is the last subject they want to write about. (Barbara cannot even vote in U.S. elections; she is a Canadian citizen.) Claims relating to Obama are the top searches on the site, but "even when there were Republicans in the White House, the mail was still overwhelmingly anti-liberal," David Mikkelson said.

In late August, David Mikkelson studied an e-mail chain letter titled "The Last of the Kennedy Dynasty," purporting to explain why the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was unfit for acclaim. Some of its 10 bullet points were true (yes, Kennedy was cited for reckless driving while in college), but others were misleading assumptions (no, his accomplishments were not "scant").

Barbara Mikkelson rolled her eyes at her husband's plans to fact-check the chain letter. "That's ephemera," she said.

He agreed, but the Kennedy report wound up being the Web site's most-searched subject the next weekend.

The Mikkelsons employ two others full time to manage the enormous volume of e-mail to the site. Readers increasingly are sending videos and photos as well as e-mail, requiring even more investigation. On average, one new article is published each day.

The enduring articles are the ones about everyday fears: computer viruses, scams, missing children. Some e-mail chain letters, such as the one offering users $245 for forwarding the message, never fade away.

"People keep falling for the same kind of things over and over again," David Mikkelson said. Some readers always seem to believe, for instance, that the government is trying to poison them: Barbara Mikkelson said rumors about AIDS have been recycled into rumors about swine-flu vaccines.

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one's point of view.

"Especially in politics," David Mikkelson said, "most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false. In the larger sense, it's people wanting confirmation of their world view."

The couple say they regularly receive grateful messages from teachers, and an award from a media literacy association sits atop the TV set in David Mikkelson's home office.

It is not just the naiveté of Web users that worries the "Snopesters," a name for the Web site's community of fans and volunteers. It is also what David Mikkelson calls "a trend toward the opposite approach, hyper-skepticism."

"People get an e-mail or a photograph and they spot one little thing that doesn't look right, and they declare the whole thing fake," he said. "That's just as bad as being gullible in a lot of senses."

But even though Snopes pays the bills for the couple now, through advertising revenue, they doubt they are having much of an impact.

"It's not like, 'Well, we have to get out there and defend the truth,' " Barbara Mikkelson said. "When you're looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn't stand a chance."