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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

So satire cannot exist? Because anyone who might accidentally mistake it for truth can be "harmed"

Journalists have a big megaphone. Their job is to amplify truth. If I'm making jokes and being clear about my intentions, but a lazy journalist sees my content as easy clickbait, that's my fault?

What I was tweeting was never "news" let alone "fake news". It was never wrapped deceptively as truth. It wasn't a prank. Someone else took my words, which were obviously and provably not truth, and held them up under their reputation as an authority of truth. Why should I be responsible for the alleged harm that they caused?

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Why add entropy to the situation? We know people mid-understand satire and sarcasm.

I do kind of feel much satire is deliberately harmful - people use it to say things and then hide behind ‘but I was just joking’ having already pushed the message out.

It's not my job to cater to people who choose to get their "news" from a website where anyone can post anything under any identity at all. There has never been any credibility to Twitter as an authoritative news source, especially from accounts that are clearly labeled as a joke. Silencing or shaming folks for being creative in public is far worse than empowering the layman (or lazy journalist) to get their news from the gutter.

People will post lies online regardless of whether the good intentioned folks self censor or not. The problem is not the satire, it's the blind trust.

Speaking of which, I've got a rich client who recent passed away and left a significant sum to one Chris Seaton. If that's you, just shoot me your bank details and I'll get the money wired to you directly.

Something tells me you also regard stand-up comedy as harmful.

Nobody confuses a stand-up club as news - people do confuse Twitter as news.

“My use case for satire is obvious but yours is not”

And I knew folks who thought Spinal Tap was a real band. Satire is therapeutic when the crap around us gets too deep.

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