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'Stolen satire' feeds US election misinformation

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Agence France-Presse

<p>WASHINGTON — Did a Donald Trump supporter burn down his house while igniting an LGBTQ flag? Did a conservative think tank recommend &quot;period passports&quot; to monitor pregnancies? Was Kamala Harris&#x27;s running mate dissed by his own state&#x27;s professional football team?</p><p>Do not be fooled. This is satire.</p><p>But it is no laughing matter.</p><p>These claims were widely mistaken as real across social media, underscoring how content from satirical websites is being repurposed to fuel political misinformation and sow confusion ahead of the November 5 presidential election.</p><p>The nonprofit News Literacy Project (NLP) calls such misinformation &quot;stolen satire&quot; -- plucking satirical content from its original context and presenting it as accurate information without a clear disclaimer.</p><p>&quot;People who aren&#x27;t in on the joke take it at face value,&quot; Hannah Covington, a senior director at NLP, told AFP.</p><p>Ahead of the National Football League regular season, social media users falsely claimed the Minnesota Vikings had denounced Tim Walz, the state&#x27;s governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate, questioning his leadership.</p><p>But the Vikings had issued no such statement.</p><div><a href="https://news.abs-cbn.com/news/2024/9/30/dict-warns-vs-fake-ai-content-this-election-1416">RELATED: DICT warns vs fake AI content this election</a></div><p>AFP&#x27;s fact-checkers found that the falsehood stemmed from the Facebook page of America&#x27;s Last Line of Defense, a network of parody websites run by Christopher Blair.</p><p>The group clarifies that &quot;nothing on this page is real.&quot;</p><p>Blair said his target audience shares such claims because they &quot;fit with their confirmation-biased narrative of the world.&quot;</p><p>&quot;They don&#x27;t necessarily share them because they believe them,&quot; Blair told AFP.</p><p>&quot;Whether or not a thing is true no longer matters to about 35 million Americans. If it&#x27;s what they want to hear, they&#x27;ll pass it along.&quot;</p><div><strong>&#x27;Weaponized misinformation&#x27;</strong></div><p>Such humorous fiction —  peddled by both sides of the political aisle —  often makes the internet erupt with laughter, but researchers are not laughing about its potential to fool the public.</p><p>&quot;Sharing weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes has quickly come to define the developing presidential campaign between&quot; Trump and Vice President Harris, tech writer Casey Newton wrote in an online commentary.</p><p>&quot;Across social networks, Democrats and Republicans are flooding the feed with obviously untrue statements about one another and calling it a joke.&quot;</p><p>Some viral posts falsely claimed that an Iowa-based fan of &quot;Make America Great Again&quot; -- the political movement and slogan popularized by Trump -- had mistakenly burned his house down while attempting to incinerate an LGBTQ flag.</p><p>The man was ridiculed as &quot;stupid&quot; and &quot;homophobic.&quot;</p><p>But AFP found that the claim originated in satire.</p><p>Other posts falsely claimed that Project 2025, a set of policy proposals by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, recommends mandating that women carry &quot;period passports&quot; to monitor their menstrual cycle and pregnancies.</p><p>The Heritage Foundation, widely considered aligned with Trump&#x27;s agenda, told AFP that the claim was &quot;absolutely false.&quot;</p><p>The Halfway Post, founded by the political satirist Dash MacIntyre, first published both claims.</p><div><a href="https://news.abs-cbn.com/news/2024/7/27/expert-warns-of-escalation-in-use-of-deepfakes-after-release-of-fake-video-of-marcos-jr-1247">RELATED: Expert warns of escalation in use of deepfakes after release of fake video of Marcos Jr.</a></div><div><strong>&#x27;Outrage into clicks&#x27;</strong></div><p>MacIntyre, who said Trump&#x27;s election in 2017 inspired him to start his satire company, insisted that he was not trying to &quot;proliferate fake news&quot; but that politicians deserve lampooning in a climate of &quot;political insanity.&quot;</p><p>&quot;It&#x27;s not really my fault that if I fictionalize alleged incidents involving Trump to critique and satirize his awful personality... so many viewers take it seriously,&quot; he told AFP.</p><p>&quot;There are always gullible and low-information people, but I don&#x27;t think that means satirical comedy doesn&#x27;t belong&quot; on social media, he added.</p><p>But when passively scrolling the internet, such posts without labels or context may look real, the NLP&#x27;s Covington said, adding that some clout-chasing actors were exploiting the trend to &quot;convert outrage into clicks.&quot;</p><p>Elon Musk, owner of the platform X who has endorsed Trump, recently courted criticism for sharing a deepfake video in which a voiceover mimicking Harris declared that she does not &quot;know the first thing about running the country.&quot;</p><p>The video was originally posted by an X account that labeled it as a &quot;parody,&quot; but Musk&#x27;s repost made no such disclosure.</p><div><a href="https://news.abs-cbn.com/world/2024/10/12/trump-demonizes-migrants-in-dark-misleading-speech-1103">RELATED: Trump demonizes migrants in dark, misleading speech</a></div><p>&quot;Clear and consistent practices like watermarking something as satire is so important to help preserve its original context,&quot; Covington said.</p><p>&quot;Most platforms do not have any real policies they consistently enforce around this kind of content, so it&#x27;s up to us as consumers to verify before sharing.&quot;</p><div><br/></div><div><strong>© Agence France-Presse</strong></div><div><br/></div><div><strong>RELATED VIDEO</strong></div><div><span class="fr-video fr-deletable fr-fvc fr-dvb fr-draggable" contenteditable="false" draggable="true"><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pEnvj304BOo?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;rel=0" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable"></iframe></span><br/></div>

<p>Such humorous fiction — peddled by both sides of the political aisle — often makes the internet erupt with laughter, but researchers are not laughing about its potential to fool the public.</p>

Such humorous fiction — peddled by both sides of the political aisle — often makes the internet erupt with laughter, but researchers are not laughing about its potential to fool the public.