Snopes Exposed as CIA Operation Designed to Spread Disinformation-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Snopes is a CIA operation designed to spread misinformation and suppress independent websites.
The Truth:
There’s no evidence to support claims that the CIA created Snopes to spread disinformation and to counter independent websites that are critical of the agency.
The rumor first surfaced in October 2016 on the conspiracy-minded website The Wayne Madsen Report. The Snopes CIA report, which is hidden behind a paywall, takes issue with Snopes’ referral to the website a “disreputable web site.” The only “proof” provided in the report is the statement that “Nothing says ‘CIA’ more than Snopes.com’s description of legitimate news reports of CIA director John Brennan being a Wahhabist and Saudi sympathizer as ‘bogus.’
The report appears to take issue with Snopes’ January 2015 conclusion that the claim that CIA Director John Brennan secretly converted to Islam while stationed in Saudi Arabia was unproven. (TruthorFiction.com reached the same conclusion). Aside from Snopes’ classifying Brennan story as “unproven,” The Wayne Madsen Report doesn’t provide any hard evidence what so ever that Snopes is operated by the CIA. For that reason, we’re calling this one “fiction.”
Claims that Snopes is a front for the CIA reemerged in May 2018 with a report that appeared at Your News Wire under the headline, “Snopes Finally Exposed as CIA Operation.” The report cites only The Wayne Madsen Report, and it failed to acknowledge that the report was two years old and called it a “recent investigation.”
We previously investigated several stories appearing at the Wayne Madsen Report and found them to be baseless. One falsely accused Ted Cruz’s father of aiding Lee Harvey Oswald in assassinating John F. Kennedy.