“WHO calls to ban women from drinking alcohol!” watchdogs shouted today.

Though it’s 2021 and most of us are traumatized beyond the point of being surprised, such a headline should shock us. If we bring back prohibition—specifically aimed at women—what comes next? Passports and bank accounts frozen? Then red cloaks and white bonnets? In fiction, it always starts slowly at ends suddenly, and by this time we should know that the sci-fi and dystopia genres are warnings to our future selves.

If you google the new WHO proclamation about banning women from obtaining alcohol, Snopes is quick to swoop in—not unlike a sniveling sycophant defending a narcissist—and screech that “That’s not true! Fake news!” Keep in mind that fact-checking websites aren’t nun-run charities handing out truth to children for free—they get funded by big companies. In 2018, Snopes received $408,000 from Facebook for being part of the fact-checking initiative, while In 2020, FactCheck.org received $66,000 from the same donor.

This isn’t the first time that Snopes has fudged the facts in order to make a health organization look good, either. Snopes says that the May-famous leaked Fauci emails generated “a new push by Republican leaders and conspiracy theorists that suggested content in his emails provided evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was manufactured and leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.”

Even though you can actually read the email where Virologist Adam Gaertner describes how the virus was created, (It’s on page 2286 of the emails.) Snopes calls anyone who would dare to draw conclusions about this now-public information a “conspiracy theorist.” It then goes on to state nobly that Fauci did nothing wrong. Apparently, Snopes is the judge and jury.

Rather than eating up Snopes’s papal bull, I went on to do my own research. Snopes may wish to put fears and suspicions to rest, but the fuller text of WHO’s initiative on globally preventing the harmful effects of alcohol is less than soothing.

Suggestions of an alcohol ban happen as early as page 4 of the report. “The most cost-effective actions, or “best buys”, include…enacting and enforcing restrictions on the physical availability of retailed alcohol.” Right off the bat, we see a kind of prohibition mentioned. Strike one against Snopes. Page nineteen again invokes forced teetotaling: “…dialogue should also aim for implementation of comprehensive restrictions or bans on traditional, online or digital marketing (including sponsorship), as well as on sales, e-commerce, delivery…”

Vague overall, but the words are there.

The document spends a lot of time advocating against alcohol advertisement, and calls for education about the effects of firewater, specifically towards groups who are most affected by it. And jammed in there, on page 17, is the sentence under fire—the prima donna of this drama.

“Appropriate attention should be given to prevention of the initiation of drinking among children and adolescents, prevention of drinking among pregnant women and women of childbearing age, and protection of people from pressures to drink, especially in societies with high levels of alcohol consumption where heavy drinkers are encouraged to drink even more…”

While the paragraph as a whole involves education and marketing, it drops out of step to speak of “prevention,” not as a function of advertisement or instruction, but simply as “prevention.” It’s this vagueness that’s riling up drinkers and abstainers alike. What would this “prevention” entail? How will it be enforced? What about women who are childbearing age but who don’t plan to have children? And what is childbearing age, anyway?

Snopes has no business telling us that it’s fine and there’s nothing to worry about, a line you’d expect to hear in a dingy YA novel, coming out of a megaphone in a grim future.

So many articles these days start with “What you need to know about…” and “Here’s what you need to know,” that it all blurs together and we lose focus of the fact that it’s nobody’s job to tell us what’s important for us to know and what isn’t.

For watchful American citizens, every fact is important. It’s our job to keep the borders of our democracy safe from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Every inch of encroachment on personal freedom gives precedent for dictators to take a foot, which is next-door to a mile. While the intentions of Snopes seem honorable at first glance, upon further inspection we see that having fact-check agencies who give us the “bottom line” fact really just cripples our critical thinking. React with scrutiny, loudness, and rage. Push back, always.