A few days ago I posted the photo of a woman explicitly demonstrating sex toys in front of what appears to be a young teenage boy on social media.

One of my connections uses Snopes as her go-to resource for truth and pointed out that Snopes has declared the image fake.

Reading their analysis of why it is fake raises more questions than the image itself, but it made me wonder, what does Snopes have to say about the many claims of feminism.

Well as it turns out, not a whole lot, because the way Snopes works is that it only investigates the things people search on, and it’s not as if Snopes is the go-to resource for anybody but left-leaning normies who are hell-bent on finding some pseudo credible resource to counter what the see as fake news.

What is the most generic claim of feminism?

I had a think about it, and I came to the conclusion that the most generic claims of feminism are related to the various claims that men use sexual violence as a tool to oppress women, and putting aside the various statistics that indicate that men are actually just as likely to be sexually assaulted, I decided to see if Snopes had ever fact-checked these feminist claims.

I remembered that during the Brett Cavanaugh hearings Lena Dunham repeated the feminist claim that rape allegations are rare, with only 2% of allegations being false.

You’d think that would have people running to check the claim on Snopes, but the kind of people who run to Snopes have no reason to doubt that claim.

In fact, a quick check of Snopes indicates that the Snopes have really neglected the claims of feminists, arguably because feminists themselves rarely concern themselves with questioning the claims made by other feminists.

I did find a Snopes page where they fact-checked the outlandish claim that 99% of all rape allegations were fabricated, but that page then went on to cite only one of several research papers on the subject, a research paper that itself cited other peer-reviewed research that indicates false allegation rates are between 5 and 60%.

False Rape allegation research

Here is Snopes cut-and-paste analysis of the research they chose to cite.

At face value, and it seems to indicate that only two years ago it was found that 5% of rape allegations were false, but does it?

The legal definition of Rape has changed significantly since 2006, and in the United States the FBI has a different definition, and so too does each of the 50 states.

The crime of Rape has traditionally been forced sexual intercourse, and forced sexual intercourse usually leaves physical evidence.

Because of this reliance on physical evidence, traditional concepts of Rape not only depend on physical evidence but they also limit an alleged victim’s ability to file a complaint via a relatively short Statute of Limitations.

Where rape requires evidence that intercourse was forced and allegation needs to be made promptly, a 5% false allegation rate seems quite fair and reasonable.

Today Rape is defined as non-consensual sex, and the Statute of Limitations is much longer; non-consensual sex is now interpreted to include willingly participating in sexual activity while under the influence of alcohol and that opens the door to an accuser being able to file an accusation with no evidence at all.

If you consider this reality, fact that police are now told to believe the accuser and the effects of social media and #metoo movement, it is pretty fair to say that there is a very good chance that the rates of false accusation have increased considerably since 2006.

False Rape accusations are a crime, and criminologists have long known that criminals are opportunistic.

If the rate of false Rape allegation was 5% at a time where it was difficult to bring a Rape allegation, and the chances of getting caught making a false allegation were high, it would stand to reason that the number would be considerably higher when it is much easier to bring a Rape allegation and the chances are of getting caught are lower.

The fact-checking feedback loop

Not only does Snopes only fact-check the things that the people who visit Snopes want facts on, but its fact-checkers only use Google to search for answers, but Google aren’t unbiased either.

If you search on “False Rape Allegations” using Google, you get a different list of responses to Bing and DuckDuckGo, not only that, the responses all feature Snopes in their responses.

A quick search on Alex Kasprak, the author of the Snopes fack-check, indicates that he has absolutely no experience in dealing with criminal matters, he used to write for left-wing Buzzfeed and his 3 years at Snopes is the longest job he’s ever managed to keep.

Not only that, but in less than 3 years at Snopes Alex is now considered a senior writer.

Which begs the question, what effect does it have when Snopes use Google, Google use Snopes, Snopes only fact-check what Snopes users search for and Snopes articles are written by people who only fact-check what left-wing people want them to check and they fact-check them with no subject-matter experience?

How can somebody claim to write about scientific misinformation when they work in one big circle jerk?

If Snopes fact-checked this article would they find it true or false?

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone (John 8.7).