The news, like a vagina, is a delicate ecosystem. This isn’t my analogy; it comes compliments of Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of the fact-checking, hoax-debunking website Snopes. “I compared fake news in one interview to a yeast infection. I was talking to a dude, and he went really silent,” she tells me. I, of course, asked her to elaborate.“The news in general is a delicate ecosystem. If it gets overrun with a bad fungus in the form of fake news, the balance gets upset and it becomes extremely uncomfortable—and very difficult for the entire body politic,” she says. “And so you have to flush it out. Not flush it out, you have to...I think my analogy just fell flat.”

“Cleanse it gently?” I suggest.

“Yes!” she replies. “Cleanse it gently. With real news.”

Snopes is an antifungal, if you will, designed to clear out the harmful stuff. In this era of fake social media bots, Russian propaganda campaigns, and a president hell-bent on undermining the reality-based media, Snopes is still one destination many of us trust to separate fact from fiction. The site provides handy links for when your relatives forward you absurd email chain letters or post diatribes propagating conspiracies on Facebook.

For most of its early years, Snopes, founded in 1994 by a husband-and-wife team in California, had been a small-scale operation. But the explosion of fake news over the past few years has made it more relevant than ever. Today, Snopes has a staff of 15, with eight writers and editors who make it their daily endeavor to tell you when someone’s wrong on the Internet. Bless.

That Sisyphean task seems to be only getting harder. Intelligence officials are already warning that Russia will attempt to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections—in part by spreading online propaganda. Meanwhile, the student activists who emerged as leaders in the fight to end gun violence have become targets for hoaxes vicious enough to shock even the most jaded news consumer. The week I spoke to Binkowski, the website battled false rumors that Parkland survivor Emma González ripped up the Constitution on film. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more disgusting,” Binkowski says of the attacks on González and other Parkland kids. “And I’ve seen a lot of gross stuff.”

