I did Donald Trump a supporter burned down his house while burning an LGBTQ flag? Conservative think tank recommends ‘period passports’ for pregnancy monitoring? it was Kamala Harris‘his runner-up snubbed by his home state’s pro football team?
Don’t be fooled. This is satire.
But it’s no laughing matter.
These claims were widely mistaken for real on social media, highlighting how content from satirical websites is being repurposed to fuel political disinformation and sow confusion ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election.
The nonprofit News Literacy Project (NLP) calls such misinformation “stolen satire”—ripping satirical content out of its original context and presenting it as accurate information without a clear disclaimer.
“People who aren’t into the joke take it at face value,” Hannah Covington, senior director at NLP, told AFP.
Before the National Football League regular season, social media users falsely claimed that the Minnesota Vikings had denounced Tim Waltz, the state’s governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate, questioning his leadership.
But the Vikings had made no such statement.
AFP fact-checkers found the lies originated from the Facebook page of America’s Last Line of Defense, a network of parody websites run by Christopher Blair.
The group clarifies that “nothing on this page is real.”
Blair said his target audience shared such claims because they “fit their confirmation-biased narrative of the world”.
“They don’t necessarily share them because they believe them,” Blair told AFP. “Whether something is true or not doesn’t matter anymore to about 35 million Americans.” If it’s what they want to hear, they’ll pass it on.”
“WEAPONED DISINFORMATION”
Such a humorous concoction — offered on both sides of the political aisle — often makes the Internet erupt with laughter, but researchers aren’t laughing at its potential to mislead the public.
“The sharing of weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes quickly came to define the evolving presidential campaign between” Trump and Vice President Harris, wrote tech writer Casey Newton in an online commentary.
“On social media, Democrats and Republicans are flooding feeds with patently false claims about each other and calling it a joke.
Some viral posts falsely claimed that an Iowa-based fan of “Make America Great Again” — the political movement and slogan promoted by Trump — mistakenly set his house on fire while trying to burn an LGBTQ flag.
The man was derided as “stupid” and a “homophobe”.
But AFP found the claim originated as satire.
Other publications falsely claimed that Project 2025, a set of policy proposals from the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, recommended that women carry “period passports” to monitor their periods and pregnancies.
The Heritage Foundation, which is widely seen as sympathetic to Trump’s agenda, told AFP the claim was “absolutely false”.
The Halfway Post, founded by political satirist Dash McIntyre, first published both claims.
“OUTRAGE TO THE CLICKS”
McIntyre, who said Trump’s election in 2017 inspired him to start his satire company, insisted he wasn’t trying to “spread fake news” but that politicians deserved to speak out in an atmosphere of “political madness.” .
“It’s not really my fault that if I make up alleged incidents involving Trump to criticize and satirize his terrible personality … so many viewers take it seriously,” he told AFP.
“There are always gullible and ill-informed people, but I don’t think that means satirical comedy doesn’t belong” on social media, he added.
But when passively scrolling through the Internet, such posts without tags or context can appear genuine, said NLP’s Covington, adding that some influence-seeking actors are exploiting the tendency to “convert outrage into clicks.”
Elon Musk, the owner of the X platform who endorsed Trump, recently drew criticism for sharing a deeply fake video in which a voiceover impersonating Harris stated that she “doesn’t know anything about running the country.”
The video was originally posted by an X account that labeled it a “parody,” but Musk’s repost made no such disclosure.
“Clear and consistent watermarking practices for something like satire are so important to help preserve its original context,” Covington said.
“Most platforms don’t have real policies they consistently enforce on this kind of content, so it’s up to us as users to check before we share.”
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