The problem with fact-checkers is not that checking facts is useless, but that their status as guardians of the truth is not justified. When OceanGate’s mini-sub went missing near the wreck of Titanic, some critics of Elon Musk used the opportunity to score political points by promoting his Twitter competitors by declaring that his company Starlink was being used for communicating with the sub. The team at Snopes initially rated this claim as “true,” before changing it to “unproven,” before finally labeling it “false.”
The official claim Snopes’s Nur Ibrahim checked on Tuesday was “OceanGate, the company behind the submersible that went missing in June 2023 on a Titanic wreckage exploration, relied on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites to provide communications during the expedition.”
Ibrahim recounted that “When news broke of the failed communications, a number of news reports and posts claimed that the missing submersible was relying on Elon Musk's Starlink satellites for its communications.”
The two sources Ibrahim relied on were not scientific or Navy-based publications that might have insight into underwater communications, but the India-based Hindustan Times and a since-deleted tweet from Pop Crave, which portrays itself as “Your go-to source for everything pop culture.”
Ibrahim wrote that “the claim is true” and proceeded to list several tweets from OceanGate and Starlink touting their partnership as proof.
Yet, further down, Ibrahim included some information that would not justify a “true” rating, “While Starlink and OceanGate do appear to be working together, it is currently unknown if Starlink's satellites and equipment had any role in the communications failure of the submersible” and “While OceanGate's official Twitter account confirmed that the company did rely on Starlink for communications, it was unknown the extent to which Starlink was responsible for the communications failure. We rate this claim as ‘True’ and will update this post once we get more information.”
On Wednesday, the article was updated. After the Pop Crave tweet, it was stated that “the claim is largely unproven.”
Ibrahim also adds an excerpt from an article written by Prof. Stefan B. Williams that says sub communications would be done through “receiving a sonar signal”—or a transponder—and a transceiver on a surface vessel. The revised conclusion read, “We rate this claim as "Unproven" until we get more details from SpaceX and Oceangate and will update this post accordingly.”
Finally, and also on Wednesday, Snopes put the “false” label on the story. They also added more sources from Fox Weather and a Twitter user by the name of “@PublicAdvocacy” who has “#TheResistance” in her bio and after the Pop Crave tweet, the verdict read, “The claim is false. As scientists have pointed out, the submersible could not have relied on satellite internet to communicate with the surface while it was underwater.”
There is simply no excuse to avoid citing scientists in the first version of the article while instead choosing to cite a news outlet whose home page is dominated by Survivor articles.
