Nobody here is unaware that it is satire. And I don’t think folks are saying it is “cringy”.
They’re saying that the Babylon Bee is poorly executed, and not funny. Rickjay sums it up well - the primary purpose of a humor site should be humor first. And if it is “make conservative point, and how can we make this funny”, that’s why it falls flat.
Snopes wouldn’t bother debunking that crap if people weren’t falling for the “satire” and asking Snopes about it. If it was good satire, people wouldn’t fall for it and Snopes wouldn’t get involved. You’re placing the blame on the wrong party.
Indeed. “People making fools of themselves for believing obviously unreal things” is pretty much the whole reason Snopes exists. Taking them to task for debunking this one obvious satire, but not all the other nonsense they debunk, is pretty disingenuous.
If people fall for obvious sattire (like thousands do with the Onion before they understand what the Onion is) is still not something to be debunked. There are no facts to check.
I just opened their page. Let’s a headline
“‘You Just Don’t Understand Socialism Like I Do,’ Says College Freshman To Man Who Escaped Socialism On A Raft”
Obvious sattire and obvious political message.
When people quoting the obvious satire on Facebook clearly believe it to be true, and are using it to try to influence other stupid people to vote in a particular way, yes, in fact, it does need to be comprehensively debunked. They’ve already shown themselves to be too stupid to understand “Hey, that’s satire, it’s not real.” They need to be shown why it’s not real in exquisite detail, with no steps left out. Normal people might be able to figure out “A>B>C>E>F>G”, but the stupid people need you to put the “D” in there as well, or they’ll get lost and end up at “&” in no time at all.
So, I googled that phrase, to see what people were saying about it…
“I was going to say: Stupid is as Stupid does, but then I saw it was the Bee.” So, not so “obviously satire”, I guess? And this was from someone who knows about the Bee.
“Young snotty misquided know it all understands communism better than old man who escaped it bahaahaaaa we have some very verystupid youth these days lol” Apparently doesn’t even know about the Bee?
“I live in Miami and I’m cuban. Would love to see this little piece of crap tell me something. I’ll wrap him up and send him straight to cuba so he can experience his communism first hand. Stupid rich kids think they know something. I’ll remember his name and I’ll be on the look out for that little piece of crap. I’ll show him communism first hand. I’ll be like in communism you dont need food and you dont need freedom. I’ll slap that communism right off of his soul.” Do you really want this guy voting before he’s informed that this was “obvious satire”?
And that’s just a few minutes’ worth of digging through the mud.
Wow! Better you than me, that’s for sure.
It’s not Snopes’ fault that lots of conservatives are fucking idiots.
I’ll also point out that on rare occasions, Snopes will have to debunk something coming from the Onion. It is pretty rare though, and most often (not always) it’s because someone reproduced the content without attribution.
Here’s an example:
The idea that people actually need it debunked is pretty pitiful, but people can be really dumb.
Even within the theme of “dumb, socialist college students,” theonion still did it better:
It’s just more evidence for the “right-wing humor always sucks” theory.
I see you’re using Theory in the scientific sense – like Theory of Evolution, Theory of Gravity – that is, it has been proven over and over again.
Yes, exactly.
Can you find anyone on the SDMB who has suggested otherwise?
This one was assigned as reading in my first-year college writing class:
Its satire that is (just like any online satire, or satire period) is sometimes mistaken for non-satire. When that happens, its a completely valid thing for snopes, or whoever to fact check it and point out “this is satire, it didn’t happen.”
Its incredibly dishonest for Babylon Bee, and their supporters, to turn around and say “oh look at these stupid fact checkers, they can’t take a joke, and don’t see this is just satire! They hate us as we are conservative!” They know full well what is being fact checked is someone passing off Baylon Bee as real news, but choose to dishonestly ignore that so their supporters think the factchecking sites can’t be trusted.
I’d also add that IMO, unlike The Onion et al, they clearly design their articles so they can easily be confused as real news for people who are not as media savvy (as in that example I posted above).
This is all a part of the plan- gaslighting, and desperately trying to get as many folks as possible to distrust any other source of information.
North Korea has this down to an art form. Kim Jong-Un is probably a hero to them. Certainly Trump was jealous of Kim’s ability to control every aspect of the press.
You have just described the entire Right-Wing universe.
Absolutely correct. That’s all they are about now. Disinformation and being against anything reasonable. I mean, a Republican in congress just came out bitching about a major drug bust on the Mexican border. He saw that as a BAD thing, because Biden is in charge. He is literally on the side of fentanyl traffickers, and thinks it’s bad they were caught “because Biden”
Of course there is. People believe something is factual. The purpose of debunking is to tell people that it is not actually factual.
It doesn’t matter how a rumor starts. It can be because someone lied. It can be because something got lost in translation. It can be because people misunderstood. It can be the telephone effect. And, yes, it can be someone telling a joke that someone didn’t get.
No matter what the reason, the false belief needs to be debunked, and that’s what Snopes does. They don’t just fact-check politicians or news agencies. Heck, their original claim to fame was debunking urban legends—those stories that pass by word of mouth.
Snopes has long debunked rumors that started from humorous articles. They’ve debunked stuff from the Onion several times, even. They do so by pointing out that this story started on the Onion, which is a satire site.
Satire or jokes are very often how rumors, urban legends, and Facebook fake stories start. Often they even lose a lot of what made them so obviously satire. But, even if they didn’t, all that matters is that some people believe it.
The Babylon Bee is mocking Snopes for doing its job. It makes me wonder if they sometimes create satire because they want some people to fall for it. Though, more likely, it’s virtue signaling to their base, repeating the “Snopes bad” mantra.
An instance of The Onion mistaking polemics for satire:
Kind of Babylon Bee-esque.