David Mikkelson works to separate fact from fiction in his home in Tacoma's Proctor neighborhood.
"It's kind of like I spend every waking moment working on this," he said, sitting at his computer. "But not a bit more."
It is election eve. And in Mikkelson's world of Snopes.com, it's crunch time.
"Yeah, everything we're working on is politics at the moment, I'm afraid," he said.
The mid-term elections don't just have the political heavy hitters working overtime. Mikkelson and his Snopes team are working nearly around the clock in rooms like this across the country. They have their eyes out for the falsehoods that are rife every political season.
"This year, not really because of the specific races," said Mikkelson, "but just because there's so much intense interest on who's going to control Congress after this election."
Mikkelson has been debunking the myths that dupe so many of us for nearly a quarter century. He began with debunking urban legends.
"Well, not even necessarily that they're not true," said Mikkelson. "Just that these are urban legends. Where did they come from? What do they say? Why do people spread them?"
But in September of 2001, his work began to drift more towards politics.
"The September 11th attacks," he said. "Because after that event there were a whole lot of rumors, misinformation, conspiracy theories that were circulating specifically on the internet. But it was really, really not until, I'd say, the 2008 election that it really became a huge tool for you know political discourse and attention."
And that attention means more eyes on Snopes than any other rumor-debunking site. According to Similar.web.com, which measures web traffic, Snopes got nearly 32-million page visits in September. Its nearest competitor, Straight Dope, got just 3.4-million visits.
That may be because Mikkelson got started so early.
"We were like the first and almost the only ones out there tracking all these rumors, trying to run them down and find if they were true or not," said Mikkelson. "And that garnered a lot of media attention."
And with the election of Donald Trump, that attention, as well as the falsehoods spreading like wildfire, have grown.
"A lot of people look at the things that we write about and say 'What? Really? You had to debunk that?'" he said. "It's like 'the audience must be really dumb.' But I don't think that our audience only sees us as you know our service as being literally is this true or not.
"A lot of people are just interested in 'OK, I saw this thing on the internet. I know it's probably fake. I'm interested in what other people have to say about it."
And given our penchant for spreading what we see on the internet, it is unlikely he'll be out of business anytime soon.
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"No," he said, laughing. "I say many times. Technology changes; human nature, not so much."
And it's not just politics. After all, he points out, there's no shortage of fraudsters trying to scam us out of our possessions, our money, or just to get a laugh at our expense.
So Snopes and his competitors will likely be around for a very long time.
Cox Media Group
