Outrage, disgust and satire

Oh, I suppose it was inevitable: Facebook is testing the concept of adding a label to links to “stories” from The Onion. The label says “[satire]”. Because, as you may have noticed, people latch on to outrageously ridiculous headlines and pass them on with their own expressions of outrage and disgust at how it’s possible such outrageous and disgusting things are allowed to happen.

I’m pretty sure that they rarely even read the accompanying story. But then it might have words containing more than two syllables. Like “syllables”. Which would only confuse them further.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, because I’m not at all convinced that the kinds of people who pull the trigger on such stories as “Obama to Cut Costs by Packing Lunch Every Day for U.S. Populace”, or “Fan at Indians Game Upset to Find Someone Else in his Section” have any notion of what satire is. And don’t get me started on irony.

I do cut some slack on confusion that might be generated by the site’s business headlines. Because it seems entirely probable that “T.J. Maxx Job Application Just Asks Prospective Employees How Much They Plan to Shoplift” and that “GlaxoSmithKline Releases New Drug to Treat People Who Just Feel Sort of Weird Sometimes”. In fact, I expect to see commercials for the latter any time now, with the voice over intoning, “Ask your doctor if Blifistix is right for you.”

Also, I’m betting that people are already contacting Frito-Lay in response to this one: “Frito-Lay Contest Offers Consumers Chance to Appear in Upcoming Bag of SunChips”.

The reason I think this is that I’ve seen these sorts of waves of ravening outraged and disgusted responses to every badly-written whack-job “statement” that someone Photoshops about [insert tech giant or tech giant executive here].

For example, a few months ago this popped up on Facebook:

I swear the response was the profanity-strewn badly-spelled virtual version of “Liberty Leading the People”. This was one early exchange that came across my bows:

I pointed out that this sort of hoax would be more impressive if the perp had spelled “campaign” correctly, and got the order of “pending further investigation” right. Frankly, it gives Zuckerberg a bad name. I know he dropped out of Harvard and all, but he should get credit for at least knowing how to run spellcheck.

(I did rather enjoy the presumption of Facebook’s legal department issuing “laws, though.)

Well, my point here is that labeling stuff from The Onion as satire is both futile and inadequate, when people raise their pitchforks at things like a Zuckerberg ukase on cleaning up Facebook; or healthcare death panels. The company doesn’t have enough employees or a clever enough algorithm to be able to sift through all the bogus crap out there.

Meanwhile, here’s The Onion’s response:

That one was a no-brainer.