Snopes was an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends, which mainly presented search results of user discussions based at first on their contributions to the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban (AFU) where they'd been active.

[11] The site grew to encompass a wide range of subjects and became a resource to which Internet users began submitting pictures and stories of questionable veracity.

[12] David Mikkelson had originally adopted the username "Snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner) in AFU.

[13][14][15][16] In 2002, the site had become known well enough that a television pilot by writer-director Michael Levine called Snopes: Urban Legends was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host.

[17][18] By mid-2014, Barbara had not written for Snopes "in several years"[3] and David hired users from Snopes.com's message board to assist him in running the site.

[20] On March 9, 2017, David Mikkelson terminated the brokering agreement with Proper Media, which was also the company that provided Snopes with web development, hosting, and advertising support.

[46] In an attempt to demonstrate the perils of over-reliance on the Internet as authority, Snopes assembled a series of fabricated urban folklore tales that it termed "The Repository of Lost Legends".

[47] The name was chosen for its acronym, T.R.O.L.L., a reference to the definition of the word troll, meaning an internet persona intended to be deliberately provocative or incendiary.

[15] In 2009, FactCheck.org reviewed a sample of Snopes's responses to political rumors regarding George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama, and found them to be free from bias in all cases.

Snopes did not rule out the possibility of working with Facebook in the future but said it needed to "determine with certainty that our efforts to aid any particular platform are a net positive for our online community, publication and staff".

Snopes added that the loss of revenue from the partnership meant the company would "have less money to invest in our publication—and we will need to adapt to make up for it".