Is Snopes a credible and authoritative source of information?

A frequent visitor of this website sent me an article from Snopes in response to the article on this site, Coriolis Effect at the Equator: Evidence Against a Stationary Flat Earth. It says:

“The notion that the Coriolis force determines which direction water spirals down drains is one of the most prominent scientific myths.”

And it calls the following statement false:

“The Coriolis force determines which direction water spirals down drains and toilets in different hemispheres.”

I consider the above statement false about toilets, but true about drains! This is what I would call a false dichotomy, grouping two things together that are different in operation. A toilet flushing is totally different than water going down a spout.

However, the Coriolis effect is so small that it plays no role in determining the direction in which water rotates as it exits from a draining sink or toilet.

That statement may be true for toilets but it’s demonstratable false for sinks! I’ve lived in the Northern Hemisphere my entire life. I’ve seen water drain down a spout in a clockwise direction, and only in a clockwise direction innumerable times during my 73 years on Earth. I happen to be now the furthest south I’ve ever lived, 12 degrees north latitude in the Philippines. The closer I am to the equator, the stronger the Coriolis force is.

Toilets and sinks drain in the directions they do because of the way water is directed into them or pulled from them. If water enters in a swirling motion (as it does when a toilet is flushed, for example), the water will exit in that same swirling pattern.

I took up the challenge to try to make water spin down my bathroom sink in a counterclockwise (anticlockwise) direction by purposely pouring a bucket of water down the sink when moving my arms toward the left. In spite of my efforts, I couldn’t do it! I could not cause the water to spin down the drain counterclockwise. It spun down the drain in a clockwise direction as it always has. Conclusion: Snopes is LYING!

I shared the Snopes article with my scientist friend, John Gideon Hartnett who has a PhD in physics. His response: “Usual lies.”

But the question is, why would Snopes lie about this? I understand why it would lie about the effectiveness of Covid vaccines, or that vaccines, in general, are not harmful, or about Climate Change, or about anything considered controversial that the Left likes to call, “Right-wing conspiracy theory”. But why would Snopes call something false that anybody who lives in a house with a sink and a thinking mind can easily show to be true? Perpaps the following excerpt from https://foodbabe.com/do-you-trust-snopes-you-wont-after-reading-how-they-work-with-monsanto-operatives/ will throw some light on the subject:

Snopes is now 50% owned by an ad agency (Proper Media) and they make money by generating millions of views on the 3rd-party advertisements on their website. It simply makes sense for them to seek out articles that are viral to “debunk”, so that they can piggy-back on that traffic and generate more advertising revenue.

Snopes was founded by a husband and wife team who are now in the middle of a contentious divorce in which founder David Mikkelsen has been accused of embezzling $98,000 of company money to spend on “himself and prostitutes”.

Snopes now has a hired team of suspect fact checkers who collaborate to debunk falsehoods that are trending on the internet.

These fact checkers reportedly have no editorial oversight and do not follow standard journalistic procedures such as interviewing the authors of articles they are trying to debunk to get all sides of the story.

Snopes doesn’t have a formal screening process for hiring fact checkers and for evaluating applicants for any potential conflicts of interest. Without such standards, it is very easy for them to be infiltrated by those who work with the industry and who have a hidden agenda.