I love a good bit of satire. Whether it’s old episodes of Spitting Image, Aristophanes’ ‘The Frogs’ or a bit of the Daily Mash – nothing beats good satire.
The problem is, does satire remain as satire when too many people believe it? For instance, the spoof news website BFN was originally set up with the intention of fooling right wing parties such as Britain First and UKIP into mistakenly using its stories as though they were true. Whenever a story they had made up was cited as the source for an outrageous statistic by some befuddled blowhard, they would celebrate the success on their Facebook Page. Everyone who followed them on Facebook would laugh, content that the right-wing imbecile who had fallen for the story had done exactly what (more…)