Spoken as someone with no knowledge of the history of snopes as an organisation. Incredible initial flaw in a study that requires objectively false information

If you think ‘we used a north korean fact checker to determine whether these stories are true or false’ would be a critical issue for you then you can’t use the commercial ‘fact checker’ used by corporate and state interests in the west either

The list of stories they have ’fact checked’ siding with govt (particularly over war crime accusations in the middle east and defending pharmaceutical conglomerates committing criminal activity) only to be exposed as correct after all a few short years down the line makes it completely unsuitable for blindly using it as an omniscient source of objective fact for a study

This is however a good insight into a growing flaw of science in the for-profit medicine age: blindly trusting organisations that directly benefit in misleading the public, either immorally or even criminally, is already swallowing the industry. Find me a scientist who doesn’t think for-profit journals are bad for science, for-profit thinktanks, for-profit pharmaceutical corporations, for-profit charities, for-profit research institutes, research needing to be funded before taking place, corporations writing the textbooks and heading the standard procedures agencies, et cetera. But putting these individual issues all together into a bigger picture of ‘science is fundamentally undermined by the existence of profit’ and everyone prefers cognitive dissonance and to not think about it. Science at some point must escape the shackles of the poison of ‘profit’ and it will only do so when it understands that a corporation saying ‘you can trust us, just don’t look at my bank account or my prior actions’ is not trustworthy actually