Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Poe's law
Summary
Poe's law is an adage of internet culture saying that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views. The law is also often abused by those who publish sincere extremism, but if there is too much criticism defend themselves by claiming it was only a parody.
Poe's law is based on a comment written by Nathan Poe in 2005 on christianforums.com, an Internet forum on Christianity. The message was posted during a debate on creationism, where a previous poster had remarked to another user: "Good thing you included the winky. Otherwise people might think you are serious".
The reply by Nathan Poe read:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that won't mistake for the genuine article.
The original statement of Poe's law referred specifically to creationism, but it has since been generalized to apply to any kind of fundamentalism or extremism.
Its original conceptualization held that online parodies or sarcasm on religious views are indistinguishable from sincere expressions of religious views. In part, Poe was simply reiterating common advice about the need to clearly mark online sarcasm or parody, otherwise it would be interpreted as the real thing or used by online trolls, extremists, and fundamentalists as sincere expressions of their authors, particularly if they match their own views. As early as 1983, Jerry Schwarz, in a post on Usenet, wrote:
Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks.
Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile, :-), has become widely accepted on the net as an indication that "I'm only kidding". If you submit a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.
In 2017, Wired published an article calling it "2017's Most Important Internet Phenomenon", and wrote that "Poe's Law applies to more and more internet interactions.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.