"Top 5 most-believed satirical claims by The Babylon Bee.../Top 5 most-believed satirical claims by The Onion..."

2 interesting lists at The Conversation, reprinted at Snopes, in "Study: Too Many People Think Satirical News Is Real/In a news cycle full of clownish characters and outrageous rhetoric, it’s no wonder satire isn’t fully registering with a lot of readers."

Both lists break down the poll numbers by Republican and Democrat, with Republicans more likely to incorrectly believe Babylon Bee satirical nonfacts and Democrats more likely to believe Onion satirical nonfacts.

Our study on misinformation and social media lasted six months. Every two weeks, we identified 10 of the most shared fake political stories on social media, which included satirical stories. Others were fake news reports meant to deliberately mislead readers.

We then asked a representative group of over 800 Americans to tell us if they believed claims based on those trending stories. By the end of the study, we had measured respondents’ beliefs about 120 widely shared falsehoods....

The most-believed satirical headline from The Babylon Bee was "Most Americans believe that major media companies should apologize for pushing the now-debunked news story of collusion between President Trump and Russia." Second: "Representative Ilhan Omar said that being Jewish is an inherently hostile act, especially among those living in Israel." Those are made-up stories, intended as political humor.

From The Onion, the most-believed story was: "Following the passage of Alabama’s new restrictive abortion bill, a 12-year-old victim of sexual abuse said during an interview that she doesn’t think she can be a mom on top of her already hectic life." Second: "National Security Advisor John Bolton said that an attack on two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman is 'an attack on all Americans.'"

A couple weeks ago, some people were attacking Snopes for seeming to be fact-checking articles that were made-up as satire. Please remember that I defended Snopes. I said:

It doesn't sound as though Snopes is confused about The Babylon Bee and thinks it's purporting to be a real news site. But even when you completely understand the format is satire, like The Onion, you believe that the satire relates to something real. You have to wonder what is the real thing that happened that this is a satire of. So, for example, in the case of "If Israel is so innocent, then why do they insist on being Jews?," you'd have to assume, if that's supposed to be funny, Ilhan Omar must have said some anti-Semitic things. The presentation of the quote as satire implies that there is something out there that is being satirized. You extrapolate....

It's not just this inference that something underlies satire, but that headlines get decontextualized in social media....