Ever heard of the Onion?
Not an onion, the Onion? It’s a satirical website that has been around for the last nearly 30 years.
That means the stories posted there are made up.
In some quarters, the Onion is called “fake news”. In others, it is called a brilliant take-down of modern society.
Over the last three-ish decades, it has featured such gems as: “Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid”, “World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100 Percent” “Perky ‘Canada’ Has Own Government, Laws”, “Drugs Win Drug War” and the classic: “Winner Didn’t Even Know It Was Pie-Eating Contest”.
When looked at in aggregate, it’s easy to tell these are jokes. Current headlines include: “Dalai Lama Revises Claim Life Only Suffering When Not Listening To Golden-Era Supertramp” and “It Almost Weirder That Grown Man On Roblox Isn’t Grooming Children.”
But sometimes, the fake headlines cut a little too close to the real headlines, and when you only see the one story, it’s easy to think, “well, maybe.”
Like a story about Chris Pratt attending a fan’s execution on death row.
One commentator found the story to be troubling, saying: “there’s sick kids in hospitals that would love to see him, but instead he goes to the other side of the country to make a guy who did something bad enough to deserve the death penalty and make him feel better? Sounds fishy.”
Yes, it does sound fishy, because it is. (It is also a direct quote, so the whole “make a guy who did something …. make him feel better” is what the commentator said.)
About 15 years ago, people got so bad at telling the headlines that were meant to be jokes and the real headlines that a website—called Literally Unbelievable—was created just to point out that yes, the reason the headline “Red Cross installs blood drop-off bins for donor’s convenience” seems so ridiculous is because, well, that was the point. The picture accompanying the article of a dude dropping off a grocery bag filled with “blood” was even more so.
They would typically post the headline and one or two people responding to the headline, outraged at the story, completely missing the fact that it was, in fact, a joke.
Wikipedia lists more than 70 different satirical news sites, from the aforementioned Onion to the Babylon Bee (a satirical publication written from more of a right wing Christian perspective) the Daily Bonnet (which makes fun of Mennonites), Walking Eagle News (which parodies how First Nations are covered by the media in Canada) and the Beaverton, which is Canada’s answer to the Onion (today’s top headline: “Trump on 51st State: ‘Canada Needs America’s Protection from Countries Like America’”, followed by “Curling Ad Contains Over Two Seconds of Sizzling Action” and my favourite: “New US Tariffs Force Canada to Use Excess Steel, Aluminum in Construction of 200 ft Mecha-Gosling.”
These are obviously not real stories, but sometimes, it’s hard to tell. Some of the sites lean heavier into the satire than others. Some are better written. Sometimes reality is even more ridiculous than the sites making fun of it is.
But no matter how obvious the joke, someone somewhere has thought it was true.
We apply critical thinking unevenly to different sources.
If something sounds like something we agree with, we tend to accept it more readily, not noticing that it came from the Onion, or from Beaverton or Infowars.
This last one isn’t a satire site, but, during a divorce case in 2017, the lawyer for Alex Jones, who owns the site, said his client was just “a performance artist” who is “playing a character.”
But people believed what Jones said, despite it having little to no basis in reality.
And that’s the thing. If I am someone prone to accept the fact that the parents of the kids who were massacred were actually actors hired and that the whole thing was staged by the government so they could “go after our guns,” then I won’t look too critically at what Jones said after the shooting. I may even be one of the people who would drive past the houses of the parents of the slain children and fire a gun in the air. Whereas if I am someone who thinks this line of thinking is, well, wrong, I am going to be highly critical of it.
Meanwhile, during last year’s American elections, Harris’ campaign shared a clip where Trump is talking to a crowd saying he was confused about what state he was in, even though he wasn’t.
Like the whole “was Sandy Hook a false flag operation” question, which could be answered with a few seconds of research, people on the political left could have figured out the truth, but chose not to, because it lined up with their politics.
A group of researchers recently released a paper, arguing that we are more likely to share something on Facebook (or X or TikTok) if something lines up with our politics, rather than if it is true. They call it “concordance over truth.”
Worse, the more politically biased a person is, the more unbiased they tend to see themselves. It’s the Dunning Kruger effect of political biases.
They found that “convenient falsehoods” were more sharable than “inconvenient truths.” When they looked at whether the people were educated or not, rich or not, left or right, it didn’t matter. The biggest factor was how partisan they were.
Basically what I’m saying here is we are not good judges of what is true or false. We are only good judges on whether something “sounds about right,” even if it’s wrong. And that’s not right.
Errata: Last issue, I called CAO Lisa Scott Jen Scott in print. Jen was the first name of the previous CAO. My bad. In my defense, I still call my sister by her previous last name, even though she’s been married five years now. I should get her that wedding video I promised…
Also, I totally said I was going to write more budget stuff this issue (like how council rejected almost all the grant in aid requests, including the library budget), but had too much content. Next week. Totally next week.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
