Saturday, November 25, 2017

Fooling the Faithful: 4 Telltale Signs of Fake News from The Babylon Bee

Satire is one of the most popular forms of fake news and some of the best satire is being cranked out by a website called The Babylon Bee. Their slogan is, “The Babylon Bee is Your Trusted Source for Christian News Satire.” However, you don’t have to be Christian to laugh at their stories. Here are a few examples of headlines.

The Babylon Bee has built a substantial following in just a few years. They claim to be getting 3 million monthly unique visitors and 5.9 million monthly page views. Although some readers take Babylon Bee stories seriously, several of the tell-tale signs of fake news are evident on the website.
  • One solid indicator is the slogan at the bottom of all the pages. Of course, lots of readers wouldn’t know that because they never get near the bottoms of the pages.
  • The articles do not name the writers and reporters who put the stories together. This is fairly common for satire websites.
  • There are two many funny stories. When you see lots of headlines that make you smile, there’s a good chance that you’re looking at a satire website.
  • There’s no About Page explaining what the publication is about or who is running the show.
A guy named Adam Ford put The Babylon Bee together and there’s also a guy named Kyle Mann. However, to find any of that out, you have to look for articles about The Babylon Bee that have been published elsewhere, like these.
Once upon a time, I used to write short satirical pieces for a magazine called the The Wittenburg Door. Their slogan was “Pretty much the world’s only religious satire magazine.” It was - and I'm not exaggerating - one of the best magazines ever to appear in the English language. Sadly, it is no longer being published. 

Fortunately, The Babylon Bee is capably carrying on the tradition of effectively getting messages out through satire. If you need a laugh, The Babylon Bee can probably help. 

No comments:

Post a Comment