The fact-checking website was launched to correct urban legends and false rumours. Now, with even presidential candidates repeating fake stories from the web, its co-founder David Mikkelson says ‘the bilge is rising faster than you can pump’

The most scenic way to find truth on the internet is to drive north of Los Angeles on the Pacific Coast Highway, blue ocean foaming to the left, sunlit hills cresting to the right, until Malibu Canyon Road, where you take a sharp right and wind for a few miles through the oak-lined knolls and dips of Calabasas, past gated estates that are home to the likes of Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian and Mel Gibson, and keep going until you reach an odd-looking wood-and-brick house with a US flag on the porch: the home of David Mikkelson.

It feels like a good jumping off point for a hike, or a pony trek. But really it is the ideal place to explore fibs like whether Hillary Clinton stole $200,000 in White House furnishings, or whether Donald Trump called Republicans the “dumbest group of voters”, or whether Black Lives Matter protesters chanted for dead cops, or whether Nicolas Cage died in a motorcycle accident, or whether chewing gum takes seven years to pass through the digestive system, or whether hair grows back thicker after being shaved, or, if you really, really must know, whether Richard Gere had an emergency “gerbilectomy” at Cedars-Sinai hospital.

Mikkelson owns and runs Snopes.com, a hugely popular fact-checking site which debunks urban legends, old wives’ tales, fake news, shoddy journalism and political spin. It started as a hobby in the internet’s Pleistocene epoch two decades ago and evolved into a professional site that millions now rely on as a lie-detector. Every day its team of writers and editors interrogate claims ricocheting around the internet to determine if they are false, true or somewhere in the middle – a cleaning of the Augean stables for the digital era.

“There are more and more people piling on to the internet and the number of entities pumping out material keeps growing,” says Mikkelson, who turns out to be a wry, soft-spoken sleuth. “I’m not sure I’d call it a post-truth age but … there’s been an opening of the sluice-gate and everything is pouring through. The bilge keeps coming faster than you can pump.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The patron saint of fact-checking ... David Mikkelson, co-founder of Snopes.com at his desk in Calabasas, California. Photograph: Rory Carroll

In the midst of terror attacks, policing protests, Brexit, and Trump’s run for president the need for accurate information has seldom felt more urgent – or forlorn. Here we are with the freest access to knowledge in history, troves of data and facts at our fingertips and HG Wells’s dream of a world brain a reality, yet a tide of truthiness, propaganda and nonsense surges ever higher. Bogus claims about Barack Obama’s citizenship, say, or Britain’s payments to the European Union, are exposed, yet the claim-pedlars breeze on, unimpeded – they win.

“We need such sites more than ever,” says Jack Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College, California, who uses Snopes in his blog. “In Trump, we have a major presidential candidate who doesn’t just parse words, conceal facts, or shade the truth, but constantly tells big blatant lies.”

In person Mikkelson, 56, is boyish, with a toothy smile and shy demeanour. On the day we meet his site sieves a typical stew of online stories: Trump sent $10,000 to a bus driver who saved a woman from jumping off a bridge? True. Chinese restaurants in Pretoria, South Africa have been authorised to sell dog meat? False. Evangelist Franklin Graham said Christians faced death camps if they didn’t support Trump? False. Transgender students in Wisconsin must wear identifying wristbands? Undetermined.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In the midst of terror attacks, Brexit and Trump’s run for president the need for accurate information has seldom felt more urgent. Photograph: David Zalubowski/AP

Several times during the interview at his home, and later over lunch, Mikkelson consults his tablet because news, or what masquerades as news, is relentless. Such is the public hunger for reliable information he is treated, on the rare occasions he is recognised in public, as a celebrity – the patron saint of fact-checking. It leaves him chuffed and a little perplexed, because his inbox seethes with angry emails accusing him of bias. “I get lots of negative emails but the people I meet are always friendly.”

The existence of Snopes and similar sites like FactCheck.Org, TruthOrFiction.com and PolitiFact.com raises several questions: who produces the bilge? Why do people share it? And how much should we trust those who blow the whistle?

Mikkelson’s home, tucked in the San Fernando valley hills, is an incongruous base to referee the world’s brawling, squalling system of interconnected computer networks. The phone signal is feeble and the internet connection sometimes drops (Mikkelson had to use nearby hotels’ Wi-Fi during the 2008 presidential election). A previous owner tacked on additional rooms seemingly at random, giving the impression of a mad, elongated cottage with an internal maze.

Mikkelson works in a small kitchenette-cum-office that he shares with his cat. His half a dozen writers and editors are scattered across the US, with another dozen IT workers in San Diego, all funded through advertising revenue. Bookcases line the property: there are tomes on Hitler, Disney, Titanic, J Edgar Hoover, proverbs, quotations, fables, grammar, the Beach Boys, top 40 pop hits, baseball, Charlie Chaplin – any and every topic. In the living room, stacked floor-to-ceiling, are boardgames, hundreds of them: Africana, Parfum, Pirate’s Cove, Whitechapel, Tzolk’in, Goa, Hacienda.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Must transgender students in Wisconsin wear ID wristbands? Photograph: Alamy

Mikkelson’s restless mind stems from a challenging childhood. His mother was a hoarder and his father moved out, leaving young David to seek solace in reading and obsessively following the LA Dodgers. “I was trying to find ways to impose order in response to home difficulties. I was always trying to organise and categorise.” A computer science degree led to a job with Digital Equipment Corporation and embrace of the nascent internet, which he and his wife Barbara – who is no longer involved with the site – used to research a passion for folklore.

He adopted Snopes – the name of a venal family in a trilogy of William Faulkner novels — as a nom-de-net. The couple transferred the name to the site they started in 1994 to explore myths and urban legends – UFOs, fake moon landings – for a small, devoted following. When Mikkelson was laid off from his job he used the redundancy cash, and extra time, to upgrade the site.

Then al-Qaida destroyed the World Trade Center. “There was a huge bulge after 9/11.” The ensuing convulsions tilted Snopes into politics, fact-checking a nation’s increasingly shrill, bitter partisanship, and in the process winning legions of fans known as Snopesters.

Mikkelson says he is not political, just sceptical. “I don’t think I put a lot of trust in politicians. The candidate I would vote for is the one that would stand above the fray.” He’s still waiting.

Mainstream media, for all its faults, tended to not “crank out any old nonsense”, he says, but the social media explosion diffused gatekeepers by allowing anyone to self-publish and upload content. There is, for example, a cottage industry of Facebook posts detailing supposed attempts by human traffickers to snatch victims from shopping malls, cars, job interviews, firework displays and ice-cream trucks. Snopes tends to classify them as false or unproven.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest UFOs, maybe, over Salem, Massachusetts in 1952. Snopes began as a site to explore urban legends. Photograph: Popperfoto

Some social media reports are faster and slicker than traditional news outlets, which often react to rather than report news, amplifying misinformation. “If somebody posts something controversial on Facebook and 20 minutes later it’s a headline in the Daily Mail or New York Post it only makes things worse. So we need to create new types of gatekeepers.”

The convergence of a wild US election, terror attacks and police shootings has unleashed a flood of misinformation but also sharpened appetite for verification, according to Eugene Kiely, director of FactCheck.Org. “There is evidence that the demand to hold politicians accountable for making false statements has never been higher. Our website set a record last year for web traffic, and this year our page views are up 146%. This has been true for the other fact-checking operations, as well.” Sharing investigations with outlets such as USA Today and MSN.com further boosts the audience, says Kiely. Trump and Hillary Clinton’s dismal honesty ratings, he says, show scrutiny is working. “I think that’s evidence that the public is holding candidates accountable.”

Mikkelson sighs at perennial rumours such as the US government planning internment camps or gun confiscations, or signing away national parks to the United Nations. “It gets tiresome having to do the same thing over and over. Most of the stuff we debunk is so distorted from its source it’s hard to think it’s done accidentally.” Even so, he is philosophical. The bilge is contaminating, not destroying, public discourse. He shudders at Trump but shrugs off fears of fascism. “The president is not really that powerful.” Toiling in the bowels of online muck has no discernible effect on Mikkelson’s equanimity. He does not touch alcohol or coffee. The closest he comes to profanity is “holy heck”.

Snopes regularly interrogates Trump’s lies and boasts but also the smears against him. The “leaked” photo of a bald, pasty-faced Donald? False. The audio clip calling Abraham Lincoln a dishonest traitor? A fabricated compilation of sound snippets from a campaign speech. The 1998 People interview quote calling Republicans the “dumbest group of voters”? False.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Trump and Clinton’s dismal honesty ratings show scrutiny is working’ ... Photograph: /AFP/Getty Images

Mikkelson lists four principal misinformation sources:

1 Legitimate satire sites such as the Onion, which dupe the truly credulous, requiring occasional intervention. “No, SeaWorld isn’t drowning live elephants as part of a new attraction.” “Are the parents of teen Caitlin Teagart going to euthanise her because she is only capable of texting and rolling her eyes? False.”

2 Legitimate news organisations that regurgitate stories without checking, such as the $200 Bill Clinton haircut on Air Force One which supposedly snarled air traffic at LAX in 1993.

3 Political sites that distort, such as Breitbart.com twisting an Obama quote about the “contributions of Muslim Americans to building the very fabric of our nation” into the headline “Obama: Muslims Built ‘The Very Fabric of Our Nation’.”

4 Fake news sites fabricating click-bait stories. Such as: “Ted Cruz sent shockwaves through the Republican Party today when he announced he would endorse Donald Trump for President, but only if the GOP nominee would publicly support a ban on masturbation, (saying) without ‘swift action … the country was doomed to slide down a slippery slope of debauchery and self-satisfaction’.” Snopes sourced this to a site that mimicked ABC News to lure clicks to an underlying malware site, generating advertising revenue. It named and shamed the worst offenders earlier this year.

Such sites have targeted Mikkelson himself. Google his name and you swiftly learn the FBI busted him for involvement in a pitbull fighting ring. News 4 KTLA reported this with photos of a mauled, bloodied dog, and of Mikkelson being arrested. All fake. News 4 KTLA does not exist. The picture manipulated Mikkelson’s head on to that of Victor Bout, the arms dealer. Fake sites resent Snopes, he says, partly because Facebook used it as a metric to limit the reach of fake news.

Misinformation pedlars appear to be shy woodland animals. Of half a dozen individuals and sites contacted for this article, none replied.

Jenna LeFever, an Arizona-based activist and writer, is not accused of wrongdoing but did reply. Snopes criticised an article, not written by her, on a site she works for, Winning Democrats. “Regardless if Snopes or any other fact-checking site wants to ding my site for not telling the absolute truth, they’re still providing this country with a great service, no matter how obsolete the truth seems to have become.” But she thinks Snopes can go overboard disproving satirical claims. “I just think it’s sad that we live in an age where people can’t for the life of them tell if something is satire or not.”

The internet is the great enabler but what drives misinformation is human nature, and that is hardly new. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” said Winston Churchill. Except he didn’t. It was allegedly Mark Twain. And the evidence for that is patchy. On this, as so much else, truth is still reaching for its pants.