Poe's Law

[Mikey]

In our age of discourse in online media, it is important to be aware of Poe's Law. I'll copy below the short Wikipedia entry for convenience and easier discussion:

Poe's law is an Internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers as sincere expressions of the parodied views.

"Poe's law" was originally written by Nathan Poe in 2005, in a post on christianforums.com, an Internet forum about Christianity. The post was written in the context of a debate about creationism, where a previous poster had remarked to another user "Good thing you included the winky. Otherwise people might think you are serious." Poe then replied, "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is uttrerly [sic] impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article." The original statement of Poe's law referred specifically to creationism, but it has since been generalized to apply to any kind of fundamentalism or extremism.

In part, Poe's post reiterated advice often posted on Internet forums, about the need to clearly mark sarcasm and parody (e.g. with a smiling emoticon) to avoid confusion. As early as 1983, Jerry Schwarz, in a post on Usenet, wrote:

Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks.

Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile, , has become widely accepted on the net as an indication that "I'm only kidding". If you submit a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.

What does this mean? For example, it happens quite frequently that somebody shares an article from The Onion on Facebook, a 'news' source that features satirical and parodical articles exclusively. However, the critical faculties of a part of the public appear to have become so bad, that parodies are easily mistaken for genuine articles. Consider just the following parody:

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

Because this article is written in a sincere language (and even though it is easily discernible by most as a parody), it can undoubtedly be mistaken by people -- who, for example, are adherents to the Flat Earth cosmology -- as the real thing.

So, whenever parodied views are expressed, this should be clearly marked as such. There is even a proposed symbol for such. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

 

[BHelmet]

Kind of like: the classic "for those with ears to hear" caveat.