Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
After more than two decades battling internet hoaxes, retouched photos, and other fake news, David Mikkelson, co-founder of Snopes, faces a much larger and more existential adversary.
Since 2017, Mikkelson has been locked in a nasty legal dispute with former business associates over control of Snopes, the pioneering fact-checking website that Mikkelson launched with a former wife in 1994 and which he now runs with his current wife from their house in Tacoma.
The dispute, which is playing out in the California courts, has generated claims and counterclaims of financial mismanagement, conspiracy and embezzlement. Mikkelson stands accused of, among other things, using company funds for "lavish" vacations, while he in turn levels accusations of fraud.
It has also been so costly that, by Mikkelson's account, Snopes and its parent company, Bardav, might have gone under without help from GoFundMe campaigns, and Snopes hasn't been able to operate at full capacity, even as demand for internet fact-checking grows by the week.
"We could have had a larger staff of more fact checkers and more editors," said Mikkelson from his home near the University of Puget Sound, where he relocated in 2016 from California. "We could have put more resources into developing the technological tools that we use."
But officials with Proper Media, the San Diego-based web and advertising-services firm that worked for nearly two years to build up Snopes' site traffic and ad revenues, say it was Mikkelson himself who drained the company's coffers.
Indeed, the dispute between Proper Media and Bardav arose "because there was a sense that David is siphoning money from the business to fund a fairly extravagant lifestyle," said Stephen Fox, a Dallas-based attorney representing Proper Media.
The case, which may not go to trial until next spring, will likely turn on the precise nature of the relationship between Proper Media and Bardav.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @04:55PM
Sounds to me like it's both a spend-happy site creator and nasty corporate types trying to do the usual shady stuff to rip control out of his hands.
Buying out out the wife's shares while buying the company that owned the other half of the shares reminds me very much of how Disney and Comcast work.
They buy 40% interest in a company so they can say "We're not taking over, we just want to invest in you." Then they buy out any secondary company that has enough shares to put them over the 50% mark to finish the takeover. They'll buy the whole secondary company if they have to.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:03PM (3 children)
Is it possible to become powerful rich and famous without committing fraud, forcible rape, or any other nasty thing you can dream up?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 06 2019, @06:42PM (2 children)
I can think of a few examples (Steve Wozniak comes to mind), but in all cases the getting rich & famous part was more of a side-effect than a goal. For instance, in Woz's case, I've always gotten the impression that he always really just wanted to tinker with electronics and pull pranks, which is one of the major reasons he quit Apple when he did.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday June 06 2019, @06:53PM
Yeah, I think "power" is the deciding factor. Proximity and corruption are directly related.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @10:36PM
Woz wasn't an evil SOB, but his partner was a premier cutthroat (and even downright nasty to the daughter he fathered), and the side effect is that Woz got rich.
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:03PM (10 children)
We could do with a fact checking website to work out who's telling the truth.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:57PM
Oh believe me, I remember when snopes published a very one sided version of this story on their home page telling users to take action against the corporation representing the interests of the ex wife and "demand justice for Snopes".
The real sad thing about snopes is that the rate of bullshit on the internet today is greater than any amount of serious muckraking and source checking can keep up with, and they're mostly just googling third party articles about the subject like anyone could do.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 06 2019, @06:06PM (8 children)
How about "No one is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Both sides probably have almost all the facts, both sides are hoarding a few key facts, and both sides are putting their preferred spin on the facts.
Pretty much like any election.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 06 2019, @06:57PM (7 children)
One side doesn't give a shit about facts.
President Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading claims [washingtonpost.com]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @07:25PM (5 children)
- Obama in Brazil last week
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 06 2019, @08:52PM
And maybe the one about "you can keep your healthcare" (although, I did keep my healthcare).
10,000 in 3 years vs. 2 11 years.
Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety eight to go....
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Thursday June 06 2019, @10:06PM
Reminder [theatlantic.com]
The press can even write the above and then blithely continue to demonstrate it.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @10:46PM (2 children)
Are you seriously comparing the amount Trump lies to the amount Obama lies?
I don't like Obama, but, brother, if you actually think there is any equivalency to the their rate of lying, you are just lying to yourself.
(the quick search gives 10months of Trump = 6x 8 years of Obama, about a factor of 50... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/14/opinion/sunday/trump-lies-obama-who-is-worse.html [nytimes.com] )
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @11:59PM (1 child)
LOL -- citing the NY Times.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @02:09PM
LOL indeed, that was a quick search, there was lots of info out there. Of course, you could listen with your own ears.
But I'm afraid I wasn't able to find any
ordersinfo directly from your master.I'm sorry, comrade, I don't speak Russian.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @10:37PM
LOL -- citing the Washington Post.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:09PM
His (now ex-) wife started divorce proceedings, saying he was spending company funds on escorts.
I'm sure that the fact that he's since got remarried, to a former escort, is pure coincidence.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:26PM
Evengelium is literally a Fake News. Couple of millennia passed and still waiting for debunking that. Probably more fact checkers and editors needed.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:47PM (10 children)
Used to rely on the site. Like everywhere else they've regressed from impartiality to pushing their own agendas.
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:52PM (8 children)
Snopes shows it's work, unlike you.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 06 2019, @06:10PM (7 children)
Yeah - except, Snopes hired a biased political "fact checker" who put a biased spin on every fact she "checked". Like GP, I relied somewhat on Snopes, until they hired "that woman". Today, I don't rely on any "fact checkers". I read what they have to say, but I don't rely on them.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 06 2019, @06:49PM (6 children)
Is this what passes for showing your work on the right these days?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @07:05PM (5 children)
Try showing some work, you know, real evidence?, for your "RussiaGate" thing
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 06 2019, @07:28PM (4 children)
Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Election [justice.gov]
That was too easy. Give me a hard one!
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @08:02PM (3 children)
Phony made up bullshit. There's nothing there... It still boils down to stupid people that believe the comfortable lies and voted for Trump and Clinton.
(Score: 4, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 06 2019, @08:06PM (2 children)
Are you actually trying to demonstrate my point?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @08:51PM (1 child)
You have no point. There is nothing there that won't hang all of your party heroes if prosecuted to its fullest extent. And Trump is still president. You, very effectively, use your RussiaGate to cover up your own failures. Your Party is doing theater. If your "evidence" is ever challenged, your entire case will fall like the house of cards that it is, especially if discovery is involved. Charges will be dropped like hot potatoes in order to avoid exposing "secrets". It's all too familiar.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @11:56PM
The desperate projection is crazy. You're doing irreparable damage to your psyche by trying so hard to ignore reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @09:38AM
There is something about fact checking and corporations and prostitutes and fraud that do not go together.
If you are going to set up a source of credibility, you should understand what credibility is and then actually be credible.
Snopes gave people easy answers and some truth sometimes, but some truth some times is also what propaganda is.
If corporations and governments and mozilla cannot be credible, then some other something is going to have to be credible, and it is not going to look like those things.
And none of those people can have backgrounds in the military or any of the countries run by miltaries, or be teenagers with military parents like the parkland kids.
The people who hate truth will ruin whatever organization attempts it. It's overwhelmingly sad the united states is over and over again on the wrong side.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:50PM (2 children)
If I am running my own company, and I take money out as an unscheduled disbursement, there's nothing wrong with that as long as my tax returns match. The same is true if I structure it as a company within a parent company, as long as I have the only financial interest in the companies.
Okay, so I had to read the article...about halfway down, it discusses that the Proper Media owners are half-owners of Bardav, so they do have a financial interest. This all seems to boil down to an issue of shareholder oversight and CEO pay.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday June 06 2019, @07:24PM (1 child)
Well I read more than halfway down and did a little google-fu. Ran across an interesting Arstechnica article a couple of years ago:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/who-owns-snopes-fracas-over-fact-checking-site-now-front-and-center/ [arstechnica.com]
On one side you have a Southern California internet ad agency that admits it desired all along to acquire Snopes along with a divorced wife of Mikkelson, represented by a Texas lawyer. On the other hand is David Mikkelson who along with his ex-wife founded Snopes and Bardav, a privately held company. May be a bit of a stretch, but from reading abut Proper Media they seem a bit like the old Dice Holdings.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Thursday June 06 2019, @07:40PM
I was reminded of the advertising agency that worked with the NRA. Although in that case, they were bleeding the company of money, rather than complaining about the company being bled by the CEO.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday June 06 2019, @05:51PM (11 children)
All successful institutions are sooner-or-later corrupted by assholes. At least one of these things always happens:
1. The founders were assholes to begin with.
2. The founders get tired of running it and sell it off to assholes, or accidentally turn it over to an asshole to run the day-to-day.
3. It's a family business, and it turns out the next kid in line when the patriarch dies or retires is an asshole.
4. The leaders get corrupted by all the money coming in, and turn into assholes.
5. An asshole succeeds in a hostile takeover of the organization, either by buying up equity (for-profit) or making large donations the organization cannot survive without (non-profit).
Well-designed organizations have mechanisms for removing assholes from power, and the better organizations make regular use of these mechanisms to continuously cleanse the assholes. If you care about an organization, you should be doing your best to cultivate those mechanisms and encouraging their use so they don't get too rusty. The alternative is finding yourself in a system where you're surrounded by assholes.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 06 2019, @06:11PM
Please, don't start obsessing over assholes.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @06:25PM
Stalin was right, removing assholes is always a priority.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday June 06 2019, @07:35PM (6 children)
I modded you up, but can't help with adding.
We need assholes to start companies so we should not get rid of them completely. What would be great is to separate children of founders from any moneys so they could use their assholes genes to do something new.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday June 06 2019, @07:54PM (5 children)
Where did you get that idea?
Lots of successful companies get started by non-assholes. And if there's enough of a market for whatever they're selling, they can really do very very well. The idea that you need to be an asshole to be successful in business is just something assholes say to feel better about themselves and try to convince the rest of us to put up with them.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday June 06 2019, @08:34PM (4 children)
Starting something new is very risky. In a competitive environment people who are willing to cut corners have advantage. Even a little advantage quickly multiples.
Yes, some new companies could and were created honestly, but they were at disadvantage. Most likely they happen to be alone with a very good idea. Most innovation is always on the border of violation(s).
This is well known by businessmen themselves and that's why they generally don't respect scientists and engineers. Inventing is easy. Walking the knife edge while establishing a business is not.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @09:58PM
Actually, walking the 'knife-edge' includes a generous helping of luck. The millions of ventures that start up and die are ones you've never heard of. The bigger ones that you hear about are bought and pushed up by rich assholes using money to make money. Competing against other big money full of assholes. And even then there are elements of luck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 06 2019, @10:05PM
Sure, coming up with an idea is easy. Implementing that idea, mostly not.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday June 07 2019, @02:25AM
Not true at all. If there's a law or regulation against doing something, that generally implies two things:
1. Someone else already did it, and
2. It turned out to be harmful enough to somebody powerful enough to convince the government to do something about it.
The "someone else already did it" aspect means that what you are doing isn't innovation, it's simple copying, and copying in a way that we already figured out the hard way was a bad idea.
So I challenge you to name a major company that was breaking rules left and right and at the same time doing something that nobody had done before. Here are some that definitely are not contenders:
- Uber: It's a car service, and the only real changes between Uber and what many car services were doing was making the employees bear the costs of driving cars around and the customers bear the cost of managing the drivers.
- Apple (post Apple II, which is when they really started breaking rules): Unless you think the rounded rectangle is really the most wonderful thing ever.
- Microsoft: They were and still are even less innovative than Apple.
- Google: It followed the rules in its early years.
- Facebook: Basically just a clone of MySpace, Friendster, and several other social media companies prior to going public.
- AT&T: They've lived by government subsidies and heavy government regulation for about a century.
- Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies: They make their living picking over the research funded by the NIH and other public grants, not by doing cutting-edge science.
- Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, BofA: Their "innovation" was a slightly more sophisticated version of a longstanding Wall Street practice of claiming the profits while making sure some other poor schmuck was holding the bag when the losses came around. Most versions of this were illegal from the 1930's through the late 1990's, they became legal, and then these companies used the now-legal tactics to wreck the global economy.
- Ford: Contrary to popular belief, they didn't invent the modern assembly line - by all appearances Oldsmobile did.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07 2019, @06:27AM
You mistakenly think that being cut-throat is a business advantage.
It can be, situationally.
But if you act like that around staff, clients, suppliers, and prospective customers, very quickly people and companies recognize you're the one with the knife, and to hardball you always, and to screw you on finer points of contracts. Employees have no qualms shirking work if they don't get caught.
Now, being overly soft is also bad. Suppliers will ship bad product, etc.
But I know two very20% growth year over year for 15 and 20 years now!) whose private owners made the very explicit decision to be humane, eg. to give unlimited mat leave (unpaid after 2mo), to allow suppliers slack time when pipelines aren't urgent, etc. There's no way they would still be going if they were cut-throat; in fact I know of three competitors to the 20-year-old who folded basically when they hit the 20 person mark and founder teams stopped being able to micromanage everyone directly. Why? Because their employees felt under the thumb, and didn't want to work for "no good reason" for someone that would treat them so.
I've seen it repeated in smaller social scale too. "Companies" in the "group" sense, where the mooch doesn't get invited back to the next picnic kinda deal.
But it's very very short sighted to assume that being a dick is a good business move. It almost never is. It's like shitting in bed. You get the business done faster at first, but then dealing with aftermath and cleanup takes time and energy.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Oakenshield on Thursday June 06 2019, @08:30PM (1 child)
Are we discussing bidets?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday June 07 2019, @02:28AM
Hey, if you've got one, I'd recommend using it.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin