Filter Bubbles and Cross’s Law: Examining Interpretations of Satire
Kayla Cross (‘13) - November 12, 2012
Satire is a delicate genre. In the right hands, it can be a piercing social criticism with an accessibility that transcends other types of commentary. College students reading The Onion on their smartphones before class, laughing and discussing serious issues, or a family sitting around watching The Colbert Report after the news for another take on the day’s events are both examples of satire at its finest. It can inform the masses by entertaining them, educate through humor, and even go viral. However, the dark side of satire exists, and is becoming increasingly prevalent in our society–– a society which, through the Internet, allots equal weight and gravity to all sources. This dark side includes angry fundamentalists enraged by an Onion-published cartoon and Democrats duped into believing absurd stories about Republicans (and vice versa). In the wrong hands, satire can misinform, increase prejudice, and, unfortunately, also go viral.
Why satire is misinterpreted is a daunting question, and one whose blame is mostly directed at the interpreters of the satire, not the creators. The cause of this inability to distinguish satire from reality has its roots in a wide variety of problems, but ultimately rests with the excessively self-confident mind of someone living in a filter bubble. The Internet has enabled filter bubbles in ways that historically have been impossible––up until the proliferation of online news, newspapers and other news sources were almost universal, with whole populations receiving their news from a small number of the same sources. However, with the advent of the Internet, the number of news sources has exploded. Countless different spins of the same story can be found in all corners of the web, some with questionable accuracy. And now that people have a choice, they choose in a predictable and understandable way: they read the sources with which they agree. This choice can have disastrous consequences, as people positively sure of opinions have their views constantly confirmed by just-as-sure, but possibly incorrect, sources. People who surround themselves exclusively with these like-minded sources create a filter bubble around themselves, through which contradictory information cannot pierce.
The idea of confirmation bias twists into the idea of a filter bubble as well, when applied to sources as well as ideas. It helps explain the polarization of politics, in addition to elucidating the development of deep-set convictions necessary to create a strong filter bubble. Entrepreneur Tara Hunt explained confirmation bias in the following way:
“If I see evidence that supports what I already believe, I will support that evidence. If the evidence is neutral, I will interpret it in a way that supports what I believe. And, if the evidence completely contradicts what I believe, I will discount the evidence, dig my heels in deeper and keep believing what I want.”
This line of thought can be extended to sources: “If I see a source that supports the opinions I already hold, I will read that source. If I see a source that is unbiased, I will interpret its articles in a way that supports what I believe. And, if I see a source that contradicts what I believe, I will refuse to read its articles and discount them as false, skewed, or biased.” This type of thinking is characteristic of someone living in a filter bubble.
The prevalence of filter bubbles has devastating ramifications for society and democracy, but its less-discussed effects involve satire. At its best, satire reveals fallacious thinking, destroys hypocritical arguments, and acts as often-humorous social criticism. At its worst, people in filter bubbles seize satire and parade it around as fact. These people, who miss the meaning of the satire so completely that they actually think it is true, exemplify the classic victim of a filter bubble––people with unflinching, absolute knowledge that their opinions are right, who will believe anything that agrees with them, regardless of its exaggeration or bias.
If, even when people are directly exposed to their own hypocrisy through satire, they still do not understand that someone is satirically poking fun at them, they are experiencing the effects of Cross’s Law. Cross’s Law states that when a person’s filter bubble is sufficiently strong and pop-resistant, that person will never accept themselves as a target of satire. When this occurs, people may just shift their eyes to the next article or change the channel; but, more surprisingly, they may even take the satirical piece as fact, and use it to confirm their own skewed worldview. In other words, they take satire meant to be humorous, scathing, and aimed at them, and turn it into an agent of confirmation.
An excellent first example of these victims of Cross’s law seizing satire as fodder for their views comes from the content of the website Literally Unbelievable. Literally Unbelievable chronicles unknowing readers' Facebook posts touting the veracity of The Onion's articles. Wading through the posts on the website results in almost excessive schadenfreude; the reader is bombarded by hoards people who simply do not get the joke, no matter how obvious it is. And the humor is evident, but the ramifications are frightening––there are people who are so set in their own myopic worldview that they will believe and spread even the most absurd self-confirming sources.
In February of 2012, Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana was outraged after reading an article he found about the construction of a huge abortion complex. He posted the link to the article to his followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook, along with these words: "More on Planned Parenthood, abortion by the wholesale." The subject of the tweet was not out of the ordinary, considering he is a congressman in the South who opposes abortion on principle and describes it as a “pernicious evil.” The only problem lay in the fact that the article he tweeted was from The Onion, and terrifically, obviously satire. Hyperbole and absurdity abounded in the article; the author quoted Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood, as stating, “Our hope is for this facility to become a regular destination where a woman in her second trimester can whoop it up at karaoke and then kick back while we vacuum out the contents of her uterus,” and quoted a client of the Abortionplex as saying “I almost wished I could've aborted twins and gotten to stay a little longer.” The fact that Congressman Fleming could read the Abortionplex article and take it as absolute fact offers an example of a case where a filter bubble prevented satire from breaking through. A shining moment for both The Onion and Literally Unbelievable, the congressman’s gaffe threw into relief the combination of a filter bubble and the confirmation bias necessary to mistake the Abortionplex article as truth.
However, gullible people in their own personal filter bubbles are not the only ones duped by The Onion’s antics––recently, an Iranian news organization made the same mistake. Just this past September 28th, 2012, the Iranian Fars news agency picked up an Onion story asserting that many rural Americans prefer Iranian leader Ahmadinejad to Obama. To some, this article was clearly satirizing how rural Americans tend not to favor Obama, in a cheeky and exaggerated way that involved comparing him to Ahmadinejad, who has a very low American approval rating. However, the Fars news agency, thrilled by the American media’s acknowledgment of their leader’s popularity, took the satire at face value and published an article on it, oblivious to the fact that they were the ones being targeted.
The mistakes of Congressman Fleming and the Iranian news agency are the perfect situations in which to invoke Cross’s Law. Their filter bubbles were too pop-resistant to allow them to realize that they were the subjects of the satire they were taking as fact. The Abortionplex article Congressman Fleming took as fact was satirizing the opinions of Fleming himself; it mocked the incorrect belief that Planned Parenthood operates solely as a funhouse for whomever wants to get an abortion and does nothing else (when, in reality, Planned Parenthood devotes only 3 percent of its activity to abortions––the other 97 percent is devoted to services like cancer screening, STD testing, and providing contraception). Completely missing that it was the target of satire, the Fars news agency offered itself as a classic example of the effects of confirmation bias. The Onion article was using the fact that Ahmadinejad was so unpopular to poke fun at how little rural Americans like Obama, but the news agency used the article as evidence of the opposite: that Ahmadinejad is actually favored. In this way, these two errors perfectly exemplify Cross’s Law.
The website Christwire also offers an interesting study of the questionable and blurry line between extremism and satire. Espousing fundamentalist Christian faith with its byline “Conservative Values for an Unsaved World,” Christwire has proved a conundrum for readers. Discerning ones can usually figure out, after some deliberation, that the website is satire––with headlines like “Hurricane Earl Projected Path, Gay East Coast of America,” the website seems too extreme to be true. However, two major media news outlets have been among the many duped by its absurd antics.
Katla McGlynn, blogger for the American news conglomerate The Huffington Post, posted an outraged article in response to Christwire’s piece “Is My Husband Gay?” Commenting on one of the allegations made in the article about gay husbands wearing tight clothing, she wrote, “It’s 2010. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't own skinny jeans or check themselves out occasionally.” Believing the satire was actually a right-wing extremist website, she attacked its claims seriously.Christwire has also fooled MSNBC host Rachael Maddow, demonstrating that no news outlet is safe from being fooled by satirical sources, and that not even huge media corporations are immune to confirmation bias; McGlynn and Maddow sought out examples of right-wing nuttery, found what confirmed their initial view about extreme Christians, and thought it self-evidently correct.
The Huffington Post’s Christwire debacle can be described using another relevant law to the study of satirical misunderstanding: Poe’s Law. Poe’s Law describes the near impossibility of distinguishing religious fundamentalism from its parodies. Cross’s Law is almost the extension of the law to its converse: it describes the near impossibility of distinguishing the parodies of an opinion from the actual opinion. The Huffington Post ran into trouble discerning religious extremism and satire--Poe’s Law--thus making it a perfect manifestation of Cross’s Law; the two work together to describe the way that even the most supposedly discerning sources, like news outlets, can fall prey to the misinterpretation of satire. The founders of Christwire summed it up best when they said that their target is not Christianity, but “those who do not question what they hear on the news.” They are not satirizing religion, but rather the religious and nonreligious alike who are so content in their filter bubbles that they do not question where they get the information that so perfectly agrees with them. And, as in the cases of McGlynn and Maddow, this satire extends to those which such a caricatured view of the right that they forget they need to fact-check absurd stories about their antics.
Ideally, satire pierces filter bubbles. It is a pointed barb that bursts them with razor-sharp criticism, causing its target to be released from the constraining mentality of the bubble and allowed to gain a greater perspective on their own beliefs. It holds up a mirror through which ideas can be questioned and opinions made over. It uncovers logical fallacies and exposes hypocrisy.
However, there are filter bubbles too strong to be pierced, bubbles through which even the most derisive satire cannot be heard. People who live in filter bubbles like that, built up by one-sided sources and a lack of skepticism, are revealed by sites like Literally Unbelievable, and are exemplified by the gaffes of Congressman Fleming, the Fars news agency, and The Huffington Post. With readers that take their own opinions as absolute fact and listen to sources that confirm them on every count, filter bubbles are created through which not even The Onion can hope to break. Thus, the purpose of satire cannot be accomplished, owing in no way to the creators of the satire not being appropriately obvious, but instead to the interpreters of the satire not being sufficiently discerning.