Scott Tibbs
The death of parody and satire, Part III
By Scott Tibbs, October 30, 2020
If you want to know just how humorless Facebook has become,
take a look at this post on my Facebook page to see how Facebook censored the photo I attached. I uploaded a doctored photo of NFL players burning a flag and the real photo of the same players celebrating a win. In the text of the post, I said that the "flag burning" picture had been "mutilated" and was false. But Facebook can't just leave it alone and allow the mutilated picture to stand next to the real picture so people can see for themselves it is fake. No, the mutilated photo needs to be censored and covered with a warning.
You do not need to fact check the image. All you have to do is read the text I posted with the image, which is itself a fact check on the image. You can also compare the mutilated photo to the original photo. Do the snowflakes running Facebook really think its users are so stupid they cannot handle the comparison and text, so the moderators must hold everyone's hand instead?
Of course, censorship of posts debunking fake photos is not the only problem with Facebook. There are many more, but one that hit the news recently is Facebook punishing the Babylon Bee and demonetizing the parody site for "inciting violence." (See
here and
here and
here for more.)
Seriously?
This was a reference to a skit in a Monty Python movie, the point of which was to
condemn violence. But Facebook moderators are so humorless that they actually took the post literally. Whether this is due to having moderators in other nations who do not know much about American popular culture or hiring Americans who are too young to get the reference, this was clearly a mistake that should have been easily avoidable. But once the mistake was revealed, Facebook should have immediately reversed its decision. Instead, they petulantly dug in before finally being forced to back down by a wave of public mockery.
Look. We live in an incredibly contentious time, where the most inane things become flashpoints in our never-ending culture war. It is counterproductive for the powers that be in Big Tech to ban humor and satire that helps reduce tension with laughter. Facebook needs to chill out and tell its moderators to actually research something before they take extreme measures like demonetization. It would save the company a lot of humiliation in the future, and allowing jokes would make our culture a lot less divisive and angry.
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