Alberto Godioli & Luisa Fernanda Isaza-Ibarra (University of Groningen / Forum for Humor and the Law)
This text has been submitted as a Public Comment to Meta’s Oversight Board, concerning the ongoing case of the AI-generated video of a politician posted before the Hungarian elections. In particular, we focus on the last key issue listed by the Oversight Board in its call for comments – namely ‘the relationship between satire and misinformation in social media content, particularly around political speech, and the challenges and trade-offs involved in moderating such posts’.
1. Are you serious? Satire and Confusion
It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through this great town, or travel in [Ireland], when they see the streets, the roads, and cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms. […] I think it is agreed by all parties, that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great additional grievance. […] I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.
Anybody who reads these words for the first time is bound to feel puzzled, at least for a moment. Is the author, in his polite and reasonable tone, really suggesting that eating the poorest children would be the ideal solution to poverty and famine in Ireland? Are we actually being informed about the nutritional value of a ‘young healthy child well nursed’, and is the ‘very knowing American’ speaking from experience? You never know these days…
The more we read, the more we (hopefully) realize that we are in fact dealing with a satirical text – or rather, one of the most influential satires ever written, namely Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729). Far from advocating cannibalism, Swift’s intent was to denounce the miseries of the Irish people under England’s colonial rule and the dehumanising logic of early-day capitalism (reducing people to commodities or ‘resources’), while also ridiculing the sensationalist, attention-seeking ‘proposals’ of 18th-century pamphleteers.
That being said, the reader’s initial bewilderment is not just an accidental side effect, but an essential ingredient of satirical expression. In his book On the Discourse of Satire (2003), linguist Paul Simpson argued that satire is based on the interaction between two forces or components. On the one hand there is the ‘echoic’ element – namely satire’s tendency to imitate and reproduce (or ‘echo’) the voice, language, and beliefs of the satirical target. On the other hand, there is the ‘oppositional’ element, which creates critical distance from the target (i.e., the ‘echoed’ material) by undermining and ridiculing it.
The ‘oppositional’ component is what distinguishes satire from mere imitation, forgery or deceptive impersonation. But how do satirists create this layer of critical distance from the very target they imitate? The answer lies in what humour scholars call incongruity – that is, some kind of implausibility in the satirical expression, achieved (for instance) by means of exaggeration, absurd juxtaposition, or distortion of commonsense logic. In A Modest Proposal, the enormity of the idea put forward by the pamphleteer, and the degree of cynicism with which it is presented, is supposed to give away Swift’s satirical intent. Similarly, in the AI-generated video of Péter Magyar, the politician’s ‘exaggerated frustration’, ‘inauthentic facial expressions and speaking style’ can be seen as forms of satirical incongruity, tipping the viewer that the video should not be taken seriously.
As further demonstrated by Marta Dynel in Irony, Deception and Humour (2018), the temporary nature of the reader or viewer’s confusion (which is meant to be eventually dispelled by means of incongruity) is precisely what distinguishes humour from various kinds of non-factual information – whether it is well-meaning misinformation or deliberate disinformation. Still, this is a risky strategy, as there is no guarantee that all recipients will ‘get’ the incongruity and properly decode the author’s satirical intention. Why, then, do satirists willingly run the risk of being misunderstood, at least by some members of the public? In other words, why is (temporary) confusion so important for satire?
One possible answer is that the risk of confusion is not only fun, but it is exactly what makes satire effective. A caricature only works if it resembles its target to some extent, otherwise it just becomes a grotesque drawing. More generally, satirical representation needs to be anchored in reality and build on the target’s actual features, habits or mannerisms, in order for the critical message (the ‘oppositional’ component) to actually come across. As The Onion puts it in their memorable amicus brief to the United States’ Supreme Court:
The phrase ‘you are dumb’ captures the very heart of parody: tricking readers into believing that they’re seeing a serious rendering of some specific form—a pop song lyric, a newspaper article, a police beat—and then allowing them to laugh at their own gullibility when they realize that they’ve fallen victim to one of the oldest tricks in the history of rhetoric. […] That leverage of form—the mimicry of a particular idiom in order to heighten dissonance between form and content—is what generates parody’s rhetorical power. (Brief of The Onion as amicus curiae in support of the petitioner, Novak v. Parma, Oct. 2022, pp. 8-10)
A second possible answer, connected to the first one, is also suggested by the passage above. By allowing readers to ‘laugh at their own gullibility’, satirical imitation also has an educational function. Looked at from this perspective, satire can effectively enhance media literacy, by encouraging us (the public) not to believe everything we read, and to keep a more critical eye on our own media consumption practices. In this respect, satire at large has much in common with the ‘didactic hoax’, namely a form of mass deception that is meant to be discovered. As argued by philosopher Merel Semeijn:
The realization that one was taken in by a discourse that, in retrospect, was clearly implausible, can prompt reflection on one’s own epistemic habits. One is confronted with the fact that others were in the know all along, and that one might have been among them, had one attended more carefully to the relevant cues. The effectiveness of the double writing, specifically how obvious or subtle the embedded clues were, will influence the hoax’s didactic force, and influence the extent to which it prompts this ‘I should have realized’ response. (M. Semeijn, ‘The hoax will out: A speech act analysis of the didactic hoax’, forthcoming)
In short, satirical confusion is not only an effective rhetorical device, but it can also have a beneficial effect on media literacy – and, consequently, on democratic debate.
2. Getting it wrong: ‘Good readers’ vs ‘bad readers’
That being said, the risk of satire being taken at face value, and wrongly construed as misinformation, should not be underestimated. Let us go back once more to Swift’s times. In her book Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (2023), Abigail Williams compellingly shows how satire readers in the early 1700s (labeled by many as the genre’s ‘golden age’) were often suffering from ‘context collapse’ and struggling to ‘get’ the joke. As Williams writes, ‘the literature of this period flourished in a climate of partial comprehension and a playful confusion of meaning’ (p. 10). As Williams also points out, this phenomenon is all the more topical in present-day online culture:
For a Gen Z audience the idea of memes that spin out into their own anonymous metajokes, often divorced from the intentions of an original creator and purposefully incomprehensible to many, is both deeply familiar and closely related to the kinds of interpretive play described in this book. (p. 248)
With this in mind, how can those responsible for free speech adjudication (from law courts to online platforms) deal with the very concrete risks of misunderstanding, while also respecting the vital function of confusion in satirical expression? More concretely – to what extent should satirists be held responsible for such incorrect readings?
A crucial parameter here is the perspective of the ‘reasonable person’ – that is, a satirist can only be liable for how the satire can be construed by a reasonable member of the audience. As stated in The Onion’s amicus brief, with abundant references to US case law, ‘the reasonable-reader test gauges whether a statement can reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts, thereby ensuring that neither the least humorous nor the most credulous audience dictates the boundaries of protected speech’ (p. 11). A similar approach is observed, notably, by the European Court of Human Rights, starting with the landmark case Nikowitz v. Austria (2007) – where the author of a satirical article was cleared of any responsibility for how his text could be misunderstood as defamatory by a ‘quick or unfocused’ (i.e., not reasonable!) reader.
In our toolkit What’s in a Joke? Assessing Humor in Free Speech Jurisprudence (2025), we stress the importance of envisioning the reasonable person in context – i.e., not as the abstract embodiment of whatever a court understands as ‘reason’ or ‘common sense’, but rather as the audience that the satirist can reasonably expect to be addressing. This also means an audience that has a plausible level of contextual knowledge, ‘context’ being an umbrella term for several inter-connected aspects – including socio-political circumstances, the conventions of certain satirical genres and media outlets, or (when applicable) the satirist’s own prior conduct (for a more extensive list of contextual factors, see Godioli & Young 2025). While not directly referring to the ‘reasonable person’ test, the Oversight Board has repeatedly highlighted the importance of context when establishing plausible satirical intent, for example in the cases concerning the ‘Two Buttons’ meme (2021), the Elon Musk satire (2024) and the Cartoon showing Taliban oppression against women (2024).
Summing up: if a (contextually defined) reasonable reader can detect the incongruity, and thereby recognise the author’s satirical intent, then the satirist should be off the hook – at least in the logic of free speech jurisprudence, and in the (different but partly overlapping) logic of an online platform’s Terms of Service. Nevertheless, ‘bad readers’ – or less judgmentally, readers who do not possess enough contextual knowledge to properly unpack the joke – still exist, in growing numbers. So what can online platforms do about this? Or, to what extent is it possible to mitigate the risks of misinformation, while at the same time protecting our freedom to create and consume satire?
3. Killing the frog
Different provisions of Meta’s Misinformation policy are at play here. While such policy states that Meta removes content that is ‘likely to directly contribute to interference with the functioning of political processes’, removing the disputed content in this case seems to be out of the question as the same policy recognises that falsehood is also part of ‘humor or satire’. In view of this, some could argue that the option of adding a label (an alternative mentioned in the same policy) could be a Solomonic solution: users get to joke, others get to understand, and no misinformation is spread. Win-win-win, right? We disagree.
In its aforementioned amicus, The Onion also referred to the inclusion of labels around satirical content, highlighting judicial precedent to explain why a reasonable reader does not need a disclaimer (see Section III). As highlighted in the brief, in Cliffs Notes, Inc. v. Bantam Doubleday Dell Pub. Grp., Inc. the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit noted that “[t]here is no requirement that the cover of a parody carry a disclaimer that it is not produced by the subject of the parody…”.
Reasonable reader aside, it is important to underline that there are trade-offs to applying labels to satirical content. There are different versions of a common saying that compares humour to a frog: you can dissect it to understand it but it dies in the process. This is what labels would do.
Talking about labeling satire and in line with what the other scholars mentioned above have argued, Robert Phiddian explains that satire’s effect ‘depends on it being mistakeable as sincere work’. The risk of misunderstandings is part of the genre. Crucially, as he points out, the fact that the internet now allows for satirical content to circulate rapidly ‘reflects a change in quantity but not in kind’. We therefore believe that when an internet company decides to eradicate confusion, it also decides to eradicate satire (on this point, see also this ForHum post by Babette De Naeyer).
Finally, we would like to highlight that the policy consequences of a similar move would be wide-ranging. Would a decision to add a label in this case be paired with a recommendation to label satire in an electoral context more broadly? And if not, why in this case and not in others? We fear that such a move would result in Meta having to micromanage political satire on its platforms and start sliding down a very slippery slope.
Yet, some might argue that killing the frog is a necessary evil – a sacrifice we should be ready to make, in order to safeguard the public from the perils of misinformation. In response to this understandable objection, we would like to stress that micromanaging online satire (e.g., through labelling) does not only kill the frog; it also weakens public debate, encouraging a more passive, less questioning attitude towards online content.
While focusing on the 18th century, Williams’ Reading It Wrong offers (once again) a fresh perspective on the merits and importance of ‘incorrect’ interpretations, which resonates deeply with present-day dilemmas:
In our critical focus as editors, critics, and teachers [and one could add, judges or regulators] focusing on correct or good interpretation, we haven’t been able to recognize the many ways in which misreading is productive – it is generative of argument, intimacy, and social cohesion. Our dominant models for thinking about ignorance – shame and silence – equip us poorly for framing partial understanding or misunderstanding in positive ways. (pp. 10-11)
Indeed, satire’s inherent link with confusion is not only a risk – it is also an opportunity to generate collective engagement, in which the online public (consisting of so-called ‘good readers’, ‘bad readers’, and the infinite shades in between) can discuss the meaning of a given controversial expression. Tellingly, the Péter Magyar video received ‘over 3,000 reactions, with more than 1,400 of these being “laughing” reactions’. And while it would be naive to overstate the educational value of these public reactions, it is also important to acknowledge how these exchanges can contribute to collective media literacy and democratic debate – not only by ‘correcting’ any viewers who might have taken this particular video at face value, but also by prompting the audience to maintain a critical approach towards the content they consume (that is, without passively relying on a label informing them of satirical intent).
To be sure, mis- and disinformation can have serious consequences, even more so during elections, or in other politically charged contexts – which calls for an attentive, context-sensitive approach to potentially misinforming content. However, this should never lead to interfering with satirical expression just because someone might fail to detect it as such, despite the presence of clear, ‘reasonably’ discernible incongruity markers (as seems to be the case with the Magyar video). Embracing this principle is all the more important in the current Hungarian context, given the previous government’s notorious allergy to satirical criticism. In principle, rather than fearing the consequences of potential misunderstanding, it seems far preferable to welcome an open dialogue between interpreters (whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’), allowing the frog to jump freely in the pond of public debate.
Funding note: This comment reflects research carried out by the authors in the framework of the projects Humour in Court (VI.Vidi.201.111, NWO Talent Programme Vidi SSH 2020) and DELIAH: Democratic Literacy and Humour (Horizon Europe, Project n. 101177739).