The Onion has been permanently banned from Twitter | Hacker News Reader

The Onion has been permanently banned from Twitter

theonion.com

137 pointsVladimof46 comments

In typical Onion fashion, they have been tweeting all day about how they are banned from Twitter:

https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1517215456985235462

I honestly can't tell if the top replies ate the onion or are just playing along. A lot of their profile pics look like people who might not get the joke.

Lol, 12 minutes, I love it.

Ah, that explains how the joke works. The linked article wasn't especially good, I felt. It's a little too on-the-nose.

That's just Poe's Law in action. It's hard to parody extremists because they parody themselves. People really do post precisely like this.

The joke works better on Twitter itself than on their web site. The side needs a link to it to complete the joke, but it's almost like coming into the gag halfway through.

Blink and you'll miss it, but the article does lead with "We now publish this press release on our Twitter account in a desperate effort to show these corporate tyrants that their barbarity will not go unchallenged".

and concludes with

"We urge our readership to stay with us as the situation develops. The easiest way to get the latest updates on our Twitter ban is by following us on Twitter."

> Ah, that explains how the joke works. The linked article wasn't especially good, I felt. It's a little too on-the-nose.

They did also put a link to their Twitter in the article ;)

At first I read the headline and thought, huh, that's pretty sad, I guess too many people were being fooled by Onion stories.

Then I realized it was an Onion story.

> Then I realized it was an Onion story.

From the looks of it, indeed too many people are still being fooled by Onion stories.

I think the reason is that reality is catching up with The Onion. There is an entire subreddit called /r/NotTheOnion just for that, real stories that could be on The Onion.

Indeed, I find it hard to tell the difference between reality and an elaborate prank these days.

It’s funny because the Onion has long since stopped being controversial enough to be at risk of being banned by anyone.

Our real life headlines have become so wacky they're indistinguishable from satire.

Indeed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/top/?sort=top&t=all

> It’s funny because the Onion has long since stopped being controversial enough to be at risk of being banned by anyone.

If the Onion stopped being controversial, that's because too many people started to confuse articles posted by Onion as being a reflection of their personal beliefs instead of the parodies and satire that they are.

I think nobody noticed the most controversial Onion bits because YouTube wasn't big at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb5rHthCXoA

I miss the days where Onion wasn't owned by Gawker.

The Onion drafting off of the Babylon Bee is peak 2022.

The Onion lost me when they snuffed the hilarious Herbert Kornfeld character for reasons of Political Correctness, which is now Woke, I guess.

What has killed the onion is that their reporting appears more serious than the Washington post.

Every satire source runs this risk

The Washington post does not intend to be satirical.

Parent wasn’t suggesting they were.

It’s a sad day for journalism indeed that Onion decided to shill for, and defend the festering trash heap that is Twitter.

I don't see any defense for Twitter, just some sarcasm directed at anybody banned that cry about freedom of expression.

Sarcasm is best when applied to both oppressor and the victim. Sarcasm doesn't have to be partisan nor make a statement.

I was surprised, and then surprised again when I saw it was a Onion article. Sometimes satire hits too close to home.

I foresee some comments with very heavy onion breath tomorrow morning.

Sorry I'm new to this. If everything in Onion is fake news (not in a bad way), what's the point reading it? Or is it meant as humor website?

Yes, it's all satire. You should try Onion News Network videos on YouTube, they are funny as hell. Especially, the movie reviews by that one guy are hilarious.

It's meant to be humorous. Emphasis on the "meant to be"

If it were not censored, it could had been useful by telling the truth between the lines with humor. Unfortunately we live in the times that even a jester can't speak the truth to the king without risking losing their life.

The Onion did a thing once when they reported being bought out by a Chinese company. I think it was site wide.

I don’t think they have a way of reporting anything real. So that’s easy to play along with.

Pity. Like all mainstream comedy, Onion too is now spouting establishment lines, and pretending to be 'edgey' while doing it to appeal to the hipsters.

Corporate comedy minimising the importance of censorship is always the funniest.

I thought people moved to The Babylon Bee anyway...

https://babylonbee.com

The Babylon Bee was actually suspended from twitter a month ago, looks like.

https://babylonbee.com/news/twitter-has-shut-down-the-bee

I still miss ChristWire

Kind of a downgrade, unless you're specifically looking for an outlet that has only one joke.

I love good satire, over the last decade I’ve moved from the Onion to Clickhole and have landed on Babylon Bee for now. They have a stuff aside from their partisan pieces that matches the quality of The Onion and Clickhole when they were in their prime.

https://babylonbee.com/news/study-finds-no-one-ever-actually...

https://www.theonion.com/half-lobster-scientist-just-going-t...

Both of these articles are recent, in my opinion the jokes and the production quality are just better on The Bee. There’s a lot of political stuff from both too but that’s not what I’m interested in.

I think both are pretty terrible lol...there's a small chuckle I get from the last line in the Bee piece, which, thanks to the terrible writing, feels like it takes forever to get to, and one from the lead-in image on the Onion piece, which, mercifully, I get right on page load.

If Onion doesn't like it, they can build their own Twitter.

This would have been better as a single paragraph.

Even better, just an empty page with an embedded tweet.

Their system is to get in a room and come up with headlines. Then they go away and write a little copy to go with it.

So generally the whole point is just the headline anyway. I doubt anyone there would be offended by your comment (which I assume wasn’t intended as an insult, but just saying they’d agree with you)

Often the headline is very funny but the attempt to stretch it into an article fails.

I don't think the articles are really meant to be read, it's just that a single mass of one liners gets old quickly.

Sufficient unto the day is the meta thereof.

Trey Parker:

“It’s tricky and it’s really tricky now as satire has become reality,” Parker said. “We were really trying to make fun of what was going on [last season] but we couldn’t keep up. What was actually happening was way funnier than anything we could come up with. So we decided to just back off and let [politicians] do their comedy and we’ll do ours.”

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