A funny thing happened on the internet.
People started joking about how Tide Pods, those vibrant, squishy laundry detergent capsules, looked almost good enough to eat. In 2015, The Onion did a clear parody piece called So Help Me God, I’m Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods.
Memes circulated, suggesting the pods were some kind of forbidden fruit, and YouTube creators played along by cooking up "recipes."
It all seemed like good, harmless fun—until it wasn't. As the challenge went viral, children, teenagers, and adults with dementia began actually ingesting these dangerous, toxic pods, causing a public health concern.
The line between pointing out how dumb something was, and that very thing becoming exponentially more dangerous—that Rubicon had been crossed.
Today, let’s talk specifically about Poe’s Law: without the author clearly letting you know, it’s incredibly difficult to differentiate between extremism and a parody of extremism.
Why? Because the actual views and their parody both seem equally irrational or absurd.
Pizzagate
During the lead-up to the 2016 United States presidential election, hacked emails from John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign, were released by WikiLeaks.
What followed is a classic illustration of Poe's Law in action: the birth of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Some far-right internet users misinterpreted these emails as coded language for a child sex trafficking ring operating out of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C.
Users on 4chan thought this was hilarious, so they were all too happy to amplify the joke (which not everyone understood was a joke), leading to a string of conspiracy-friendly websites like Infowars picking up the story and running with it, while social media echo chambers did their thing.
Congresswoman Margorie Taylor Green and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin both seem convinced that this inane theory is real, or at least they’ve been comfortable enough to tell people as much.
Their legitimizing certainly helped to create conditions where violence could occur. In December of 2016, a man named Edgar Maddison Welch walked into the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria armed with an assault rifle. Believing he was there to rescue captive children, Welch fired several shots inside the restaurant.
Although nobody was injured, this sort of stochastic terrorism is very bad for democracy. Meanwhile, the owner of the pizza parlor faced death threats.
Flat Earth Society
Two thousand years ago (and some change), a dude named Eratosthenes took great pains to study shadows in two faraway Egyptian cities. He wanted to figure out the length of the shadows that vertical poles cast at the same time. By measuring the angles of these shadows and knowing the distance between the two cities, basic trigonometry told him the circumference of the Earth.
If this tale sounds familiar, it’s probably because Carl Sagan told you this as a bedtime story:
Eratosthenes knew full well that the Earth was round, laying down the foundation for what should be common knowledge today.
Fast-forward to the 21st century, and you'll find a sizable group of people who reject this millennia-old wisdom: the Flat Earth Society. At first glance, you might think their forums and websites are home to an elaborate internet joke. But as we've seen with Poe's Law, distinguishing between sincere extremism and its parody can be bewilderingly difficult.
Flat-earthism has transcended parody. It's gained mainstream attention through celebrity endorsements and ample online support. Universally accepted scientific knowledge isn’t so universal any more.
This denial of basic science seems to have no bottom. The mindset has crept into serious, important debates like climate change and vaccinations, undermining public trust in expertise and derailing vital conversations for progress.
Birds Still Aren’t Real
Thanks to
for pointing out that “Birds Aren’t Real” is an excellent example of Poe’s Law in action. You can read that piece here next, if you missed it:If you’re like me, you’re plenty curious as to where this term (and concept) first originated.
In 1983, Jerry Schwarz posted a message on Usenet highlighting the challenges of online communication, how sarcasm and facetious remarks could be misunderstood. Fast forward to 2005, and Nathan Poe defined what we now call "Poe's Law": that without clear indicators like a winking smiley, it's nearly impossible to distinguish parody from genuine belief.
This idea resonated with so many that it gained its own name and became a cornerstone concept for discussing the blurry lines of internet discourse.
New terms like this can be useful in calling out dangerous phenomena as they begin to arise. Tide Pod Challenges, Pizzagate, and Flat-Earthism are laughable in their own right as satire, but my own laugher often subsides quickly these days.
Poe's Law provides proof of how rapidly parody can evolve into peril.
Before you repost a viral video or meme, ask yourself if Poe’s Law might be applied here. With the lines between satire and sincerity increasingly blurred, your vigilance matters more than ever.
This is what happens when critical thinking skills deteriorate. Understanding parody requires relatively sophisticated thinking.
Context is so important and often lacking in modern communication forums, then you have the speed and spread of information. And people spreading information for lots of different reasons, not all of them good.