The Lost(?) Snopes Archives

hello today I'm going to be talking about the very hardto find Archives of snopes.com so anybody who knew me in middle school or maybe Elementary School definitely does not remember that I once did a speech about how Coca-Cola used to have cocaine in it and that was for a speech contest which I totally did not win and the idea for that speech came from unregulated internet access and hours of browsing snopes.com so I actually already did make this video and literally had it uploading and then I realized I made a huge mistake so I got an editing software recorded some more stuff fixed it and then eventually after like 10 more of those editing errors I real I found something that completely derailed the entire original video so I have to start over so rest in peace to that girl so snopes.com is basically a factchecking website today in its founding it was more of like an encyclopedia almost of urban legends so it was founded in 1994 by David and Barbara Michelson Michaelson I'm not really sure how to say their names it had all these different categories of urban legends and you could click articles and each one would say true false false partially true unreliable whatever the original name of the website was actually the urban legends reference Pages it had a format that I don't see much on the internet anymore it's kind of like these categories when you went to the [Music] website yeah even that took forever I'm not showing the homepage on purpose I'll get to it okay but basically when you went on snopes.com before a certain date it would have a bunch of categories with little clip art and the categories would be different categories of urban legends and one of those categories was coke lore Coca-Cola lore so you can actually still find some of those old articles in their respective categories today if you go to snopes.com and scroll somewhere to the bottom and go to the archives but they just look like this no no clip art no silly clip art so I thought well that's easy I'll just go to the way back machine and click on snope Circa like 2007 so that's what happens if you go to the wayb back machine and put snopes.com it only goes back to about maybe August of 2021 so what I and some other internet people suspected to be the culprit is in August 2021 there was actually a huge controversy where the original founder had been plagiarizing articles and then it was a whole debacle and the management changed and everything so that wasn't the real reason that snopes is not archived before 2021 although it may seem like it would be like just wiping all the Articles from the past the real reason is that the founder I think more so David because he kind of took over eventually I think they got a divorce I'm not going to get into that but basically their decision originally with the website was to not allow the way back machine or any like archival software to Archive the website and this happened like pretty much since the beginning and I got this from the Snopes website apologizing from their for their own plagiarism Scandal and the new I guess CEO or whoever made this decision to to start having the way back machine archive Snopes so what the C BR was robots.txt files I'm not a compai girly so I'll try my best to explain this cuz I don't know if I didn't fully understand it but basically these little Bots would have instructions in them and the instructions would tell the way back machine or whatever don't crawl this website so I thought well okay where do I go when I need some extremely obscure knowledge about something nobody cares about I went to Reddit and I actually found this on the Lost media Reddit subreddit and I I don't know the ethics of blasting people's Reddit usernames onto like a YouTube video that nobody's going to see but just in case I'll link the actual Post in there so I can give the people credit but not blast their usernames somebody straight up put in the Lost media subreddit that snopes.com is partially lost and excuse me it says Snopes was maybe the most prominent website to deploy robots.txt which excluded the site from being archived by the way back machine and I read the comments and I found one comment they said Snopes hadn't always been excluded from way back pre 2021 but when it was unexclusive that's supposed to aggregate all b a bunch of archives so I thought that would have been really useful but I couldn't get it to work so they also added another website wayb back. archive-it.org asri allas www.snopes.com so I'm like what is this so archive it I did not know existed until I went looking for this website archives actual institutions of higher education and like libraries and stuff can subscribe to this service through the internet archive and it just allows them to make collections basically and somewhere in their frequently asked questions that I browse forever they say that they don't really honor the robots.txt file instructions so there's an example when you go to Archive it this is from my alma moer from the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin if you go to a page that they've archived it'll say at the top you are viewing an archived web page collected at the request of Harry Ransom Center using archive it I tried this archive it website and what do you know I found her it's not a complete archive and I couldn't figure out who the institution was I spent hours trying to figure out who archived this but there was no little note at the top saying at the request of such and such institution so I don't really know why this particular archive service through the internet archive was archiving Snopes and ignoring the robots files back then but this is going to be all over the place so here's what Snopes originally looked like I believe this screenshot is from sometime in 2005 so that's what I was talking about with all the clip art you can see coore that's one of the sections I spend a lot of time on I spent a lot of time on Disney as well there's all sorts of stuff on here anything you can think of inbox or Rebellion I think was chain mail uh movies radio TV so many things I there's so much stuff just in the old version of this website it would take days to get through all of it it's just so much fun so I hope you enjoyed I found the Snopes archive that was allegedly lost hope you enjoyed this video [Music] [Applause] so this is what my original video was and then I started to kind of lose my mind while I was re-watching the original video and waiting for it to upload cuz I'm thinking how come I found this archive or this these old crawls of snopes.com that nobody else seems to be able to find for a while I thought it's arive it a scam it's not there's like actual legit institutions including my own that use it but in you can get to the archive it Page by digging into the actual internet archive help pages so it is real but for some reason I felt like I had broken the law and I I really just kind of I kind of lost it I was trying to figure out why can I find this why is it illegal to ignore the robots.txt files the answer is no you can just ignore them there's no legal obligation to obey the instructions of the robots files and not archive a web page but I didn't know that at first so I thought I thought I had done something illegal I didn't at some point while I was losing my mind I found this on Google images urban legends reference pages that looks a little different Library of Congress so I clicked this page and it says full online access to this resource is only available at the Library of Congress so I booked a flight to Washington DC just kidding I went to the Library of Congress web archives and I actually found some even older crawls of Snopes going back all the way to August 13th of 2002 so that PID this this thing was very slow so some of it didn't even load but the icons were a lot bigger they weren't really clip art as far as I can tell from the one that loaded then for 2004 it was also a little different daily Snopes none of the clip art loaded and then here we're kind of getting to the format that I knew urban legends reference page I don't even know if that title was on there when I was looking at snow some of this was a little before my time but this is from October 1st 2005 and then at some point Snopes changed its format from the categories to more like what it is now almost like a News website with the most recent articles at the top and then you can go through archives and whatnot to find the older articles but this is kind of one of the last times I found the original format of Snopes this was June 19th 2014 and then at some point between late 2014 and early 2015 I may or may not have forgotten which crawl I used to get this photo and it was really slow I was like trying not to pull my hair out so I just guesstimate some point here they had changed the format oh wait it says march 2015th on there so it's probably when it was from ha so you can see 15 March 15 March 15 March 15 March 14 March so it's kind of like a News website and then October 10th 2015 visit our news site here so I think at this point this is when they revamped the whole website and changed the logo and it resembles more like what you're going to see if you go to snopes.com now I this is from what 20 days later October 30th 2015 it didn't really load but you get the idea the logo changed that's when it happened so in my original video after I thought that I had found something in 2005 I went through some of my most visited Snopes articles from back in the day and that's what I'm going to do again now because that was the whole point of the original video was just to mess around on the archive I didn't even know it was going to be hard to find it much less difficult to navigate through because it's so slow so what I wanted to do way back when I first conceived of this idea was go to Wayback machine. org not archive it just regular way machine snopes.com click around and just look at stuff but it was so slow I went to wayb back. archive-it.org sallas www.snopes.com so many times to get these screenshots so you're welcome this is so coore that's where I kind of got my start as a Snopes girly so as you can see this is a little hard to read it's bright red but in the bottom there's little dots that indicate True Green false red and then yellow is ambiguous or undetermined and then at some point they added a few different qualifiers for the truth of an article like not verifiable at all partially true so if you go down on to Coke calore you can see all these articles about Coca-Cola rumors and urban legends most of them are false one of the true ones is the one that led me to my speech this article is called cocaine Cola so this says yes at one time there was cocaine in Coca-Cola but at the time this was in the 1800s late 1800s cocaine was used in a lot of medicine it was like cough medicine basically so it wasn't really like a illicit substance yet eventually they took the cocaine out don't worry you are not sipping on cocaine if you order Coca-Cola there's also the rumors of War page so actually you know what I kind of forgot something uh the reason the Library of Congress page was kind kind of gate kept is part of September 11th 2001 web archive and there's a whole section of Snopes that I don't know if it was there before 911 well obviously it wasn't there before 911 because it hadn't happened yet okay I'm starting to sound really stupid but after 911 when urban legends about the event started to prop up there was a whole section section on Snopes called rumors of War so I suspect that this is why the Library of Congress has a lot of the website archived and they probably just started ignoring the robots files immediately because it's the Library of Congress um so what I was getting at the rumors of War page is basically a 911 conspiracy theory page and there's a lot there's a lot on there yeah so I'm not really going to go through all of those um or any of them really because I wanted to talk about some of the Disney ones cuz I spent a lot of time on the Disney section of this website so here's the Disney section this most of these screenshots I think I got from a 2005 crawl I don't think any of the verdicts on these changed cuz if you go to Snopes now and find the articles they're still there I think at least the ones I looked for were still there they're pretty much unchanged since they were first written so just a disclaimer but there's four categories within the Disney category Disney theme parks the Walt Disney Company Walt Disney the person and Disney films so I spent a lot of time on the Disney films one the Walt Disney section the human Walt Disney actually actually does contain an article about the theory of him being frozen in a cryogenic chamber or whatever and it says it's false for anyone who was a subscriber to that theory but here's the Disney films page there's a lot of false ones as usual I think the false ones are not as fun because it's false right but there are some interesting ones that are true and some interesting ones that are kind of murky unverifiable so I think the most interesting one on here and the one that I looked at and kind of was haunted by for a long time The Rescuers so on January 8th 1999 Disney announced a recall of the home video version of their 1977 animated feature The Rescuers because contained a quote objectionable background image so basically these little mice and I I have it cropped out because I'll show it in a minute but these little mice are flying in a little Sardine Can through the city really quickly and then in the little windows that passed by in the background somebody photoshopped in a topess woman probably from an adult film although some suspect that it was just some some random woman they knew which is concerning cuz did she did she agree to this I I don't know I don't think she did because you'll see what her face looks like in a minute so I cut it off here so I could do some some kind of hand fisted sensoring with the iPhone markup tool cuz I don't think YouTube would like this so just warning you it's a it it's a little creepy this image maybe I was just a small child when I saw it and thought it was scary and it still scares me but I think it's creepy so the real jump scare jump scare is going to be the next slide when I zoom in but these were the two frames that contained the objectionable image and keep in mind I don't I don't know the frame rate at the time but there was probably like 20 to 30 frames per second in a movie in a movie like this so this was just one frame it was not really visible to the naked eye I don't know I think the person who alerted them was some Mom I don't know if she just pressed pause at the perfect moment or if she was just playing this really slowly because maybe she thought she saw something who knows who knows the point is somebody found this and they recalled it so I'm going to show the closeup of this woman in a second so this is the jump scare I'm so what the hell is that it looks like they tried to obscure her face and did a really bad job of it so it looks like her head's been doubled and like moved to the right this haunted me when I was little okay I was scared pretty easily but this I think it's creepy if not scary at least a little unsettling especially considering the theory that this was someone that the person knew like maybe a partner of theirs if they're blurring her face like that I don't know if she agreed to this I'm just it's a little sketchy but basically they recalled it it was not included in the 1992 release or there was a different a different cut of it that didn't have the topless women and then there was a cut of it that did so they recalled the one that did nobody really ever knew what the reason was but it was most likely added in there in post- production not like added in there during the animation so it's suspected that it was some disgruntled employees who knows so the next one I'm going to talk about is undetermined and this is from The Lion King so this theory is that Simba basically plops down on the edge of a cliff and some sand flies up into the air and allegedly spells seex so nobody could figure out if this was intentional if it's just kind of a confirmation bias like you think you're going to see that word and then you start to see it some even theorized that the special effects group added it in as a little like homage to themselves but it was sfx instead ofex basically the it says a four-year-old boy noticed the appearance and told his mother or Aunt about it and then it yeah I'm just reading this again okay I wasn't going to read all these word for word but this is kind of strange now that I'm hearing a four-year-old boy so a 4-year-old boy from New York or Louisiana sounds really credible right viewing the video with his head tilted to the left supposedly noticed the appearance of the letters s x and told his mother or Aunt about it how a mere four this is in parentheses how a mere four-year-old could both spell and understand the significance of the word I don't know if YouTube will censor this seex remains unexplained when you want to charge a huge corporate conglomerate with slipping nasties into its supposedly whome children's films however it's best to pretend an unwitting child made the discovery this method increases the outrage Factor if a four year-old found the word sex in a video all by himself why then anybody's child might see it too and close parenthesis his mother or Aunt in turn notified a religious organization called the American Life League who claimed this was yet another occurrence of Disney's deliberately inserting hidden images into their animated films the American Life League which had already been boycotting Disney films since the previous April made this rumor the highlight of their September 1995 publicity campaign against several Disney videos allegedly containing quote sexual messages so not the easiest to verify story here nobody's ever going to know probably unless whoever animated this specific scene comes out and says I put this in here on purpose or I did not put this in here on purpose and if it's the latter no one's going to believe them so that one's just interesting and then the next one is actually um a thing that I found not found by myself but believe it or not I actually left the house a few times as a child and I was at somebody's house watching Aladdin and they said at some point during the movie they were like oh if you get really close to the speakers during this you can hear him say good teenagers take off your clothes so I tried to hear it everyone else could hear it I couldn't hear it and this drove me crazy so I went home and put the DVD in and sat here and listened and eventually I did hear it it's one of those things that's like did I really hear it or did I look for it to hear it but basically the verdict is false I don't really know that their evidence for this is airtight but it probably is false basically the the script supposedly says come on good kitty take off and go but then this Clos captioning says good kitty take off but then if you listen it says Aladdin says come on good kitty and then just as he says the word Kitty a second voice begins to wh whisper take off your CL who the second voice is is a mystery so there's no other character in the scene who could conceivably be speaking the tiger doesn't talk the voice is male eliminating Jasmine and both the genie and the rug are below the balcony and off screen perhaps the overlapping voices are merely the product of bad editing and some stray bit of chatter or a piece of dialogue That was supposed to have been clicked was accidentally grafted onto the the soundtrack whatever it is the Casual listener could hear good teenagers take off your clothes so like I said I think this is probably more in the same realm as The Lion King one I don't know if there's any real like tangible evidence it's false even though it probably is and then people kind of compare it to Beatles If you play a backward it says Paul is dead kind of one of those things where you're listening for something so you start to hear it which is probably true and the American Life League apparently comes back into this I didn't even notice this at first it spread by word of mouth during 1994 this rumor and was printed in Movie Guide magazine in Atlanta based Christian entertainment review due in part to that article the controversial phrase was brought to the attention of the American life League a religious organization which had been boycotting Disney film since the previous April as a protest over the movie priest the American lifely gave new prominence to the rumor in September 1995 when it claimed the phrase was yet another piece of evidence that Disney had been sneaking quote sexual messages into their animated films The Little Mermaid being the most notorious example I did not include that one I'm sorry you can find it though it's probably somewhere on there and I'm not sure if that one's true or false but I could see why somebody would suspect Disney after there literally was a pornographic image in one of their movies even though it probably wasn't Disney's doing and it was just some guy I mean I don't know I'm I have no opinion on this I just think it's interesting um another section that I don't remember so I couldn't find the article on the actual Snopes way back machine archive I just have to go to regular Snopes but I want to say this was in like the chain mail category but there was one story in there that I used to be kind of haunted by too ball pit Horrors a little boy dies after being pricked by a heroin filled syringe in a playground ball pit so I was never allowed to play in a ball pit and I thought I was just so oppressed as a child in hindsight I get it those are nasty but I feel like I vaguely remember hearing something about needles I don't know if my parents heard about this specific rumor or maybe a similar rumor or maybe they just conceived of all these things that could be hidden in these ball pits I think vomit and poop and PE are more likely but basically this was a false I think it was chain mail like a chain email that some boy was playing in the ball pit he was pricked by a hypodermic syringe filled with Heroin and he overdosed on heroin and died this apparently did not happen so that's where that theory originated there's also some more ball pit stories about snakes maybe it was in Critters maybe that's where this articles I don't know but this was another one that I frequently visited that's all I've got because this took forever the website made my computer I had to restart it it made it we so this is the most I could bear to collect and put in this slideshow but I can always find more stuff on Snopes if any of these categories interest people there's literally a treasure Trove of conspiracy theories and hoxxes that are debunked not debunked Autos crime food horror lost Legends military pregnant risque business business Critters fraud and scams humor love movies quotes science weddings klore Disney gurge inbox or Rebellion luck music racial rumors Sports 9111 College embarrassed history language Media Matters old wies Tales radio and TV toxins Hurricane Katrina computers photos faux toes like fake photos holidays legal medicine politics religion travel I personally haven't looked at every single one of these because when I was like 10 I was definitely not going into the business section so if any of these sound interesting we can always explore but for now that's all I've got thank you