Should we have a rule about marking satire as satire?
Should we have a rule about marking satire as satire?
I want to get y'all thoughts on it. I want to avoid having 5,000 rules that are impossible to follow, but this one seems prudent.
Just a simple [Satire] in the titles would be enough.
Edit: I won't add a rule about a satire tag.
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The Onion once filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court informing the justices that satire does not need labels. Going so far as to argue that satire isn't satire if it's labelled as such.
This was after a police department arrested a guy for creating a fake Facebook page of that department and posted things that made it seem like the department was full of racist sex offenders. The police claimed that since it wasn't labelled as a joke page people could be confused. The Onion argues, that's the whole point of satire.
What was the outcome?
It was a request for the court to hear the case (a petition for certiorari). The court denied cert and didn't hear the case, therefore the lower court ruling stayed in place. From Wikipedia "The parody page, which strongly resembled the real page, had led to Novak's arrest in March 2016 and a subsequent trial for disrupting public services, which resulted in Novak's acquittal.[1] Novak then brought suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for retaliation and prior restraint. An initial decision of the Sixth Circuit in July 2019 allowed most of the suit to proceed, leading to a February 2021 ruling that Novak's arresting officers both had probable cause and were protected by qualified immunity, which the Sixth Circuit upheld in April 2022. "
Ah, so the state-backed harassment is working as designed.
Depends. Nowak had the charges against him dismissed. He then sued the police. He lost that case when it got to the Supreme Court and they denied cert.
Right, so they harassed him with impunity. The harassment is the point.
If you're wondering what the lower courts ruling was, it's on Wikipedia: Novak v. City of Parma. They ruled police had Qualified Immunity from violations of First and Fourth amendment rights because there wasn't evidence they did it in retaliation or bad faith. Also, wiki notes that The Babylon Bee also requested the Supreme Court hear the case, which I didn't know.