Every joke is a tiny revolution.
This point cannot be over-emphasised. If there’s one thing authoritarians are afraid of, it’s being laughed at. Shortly after coming to power, the Nazis banned mockery of their party or the Führer. Comedian Werner Finck was arrested twice for making fun of the Nazis. When a young Soviet doctor, David Sigua, cracked a joke about Stalin, he was sent to the gulag for eight years.
The reason authoritarians are so afraid of humour is that, once they are the butt of a joke, they’ve lost their aura of power. When Finck was thrown in a prison camp, he told his fellow prisoners not to be afraid to laugh at their guards — they were already in the camp, what else could be done to them?
All of this explains why the henchmen of the new Left-Establishment, Big Tech, are so determined to police humour.
Last week, Facebook announced that it would clarify the “satire exception” to its “Hate Speech Community Standard.” While this is welcome news for the expansion of content on Facebook, the platform also suggested it would act as a kind of satire police, ruling out certain kinds of satire that “punch down” or communicates “hateful ideas.” Almost as if on cue, Slate published an article on Tuesday attacking The Babylon Bee for — you guessed it — “punching down.”
“Almost as if”? There’s no “almost”: we already know, via such revelations as Journo-List, that the left-media Establishment are co-ordinating their service to power.
If there’s no surer way to kill a joke than by explaining it, Facebook are going out of their way to assassinate satire.
Facebook previously began to develop a framework for humor and satire, including “over 20 engagements with academic experts, journalists, comedians, representatives of satirical publications, and advocates for freedom of expression.”
Comedy by committee. Well, that explains the state of “late night comedy” (or so it is called). These Establishment bores don’t tell jokes, they recite slogans.
Even the great Mark Steyn would struggle to find a joke in this sort of grey, poker-faced Wokeism from Facebook:
Stakeholders noted that humor and satire are highly subjective across people and cultures, underscoring the importance of human review by individuals with cultural context. Stakeholders also told us that “intent is key,” though it can be tough to assess. Further, true satire does not “punch down”: the target of humorous or satirical content is often an indicator of intent. And if content is simply derogatory, not layered, complex, or subversive, it is not satire. Indeed, humor can be an effective mode of communicating hateful ideas. (emphasis added)
The grim-faced executioners of the Soviet Union were a model of clarity, compared to this bureaucratic gruel.
“Words are weapons,” said Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar of Enlightenment. The revolutionary government could no more tolerate freedom to make jokes than it could everyone having pistols and machine-guns.
If brevity is the soul of wit, Lunacharsky was a laugh-a-minute compared to the miserable faceless minions of Facebook.
First up against the wall in Facebook’s War on Humour will clearly be The Babylon Bee.
Facebook made this announcement last Thursday. This Tuesday, Slate published an article seemingly encouraging Facebook to go after The Babylon Bee[…]
“The site has a nasty tendency to punch down with humor parts of its audience finds ‘refreshingly politically incorrect’ […] Critics accusing the Babylon Bee of misinformation aren’t just missing the joke; they’re missing the problem. The Babylon Bee isn’t trying to fool its audience about the content of its made-up news stories—but it is letting them believe they’re correct”[…]
Facebook has previously attacked the Bee, of course. Last October, Facebook demonetized the satire site, claiming that a satirical article that quoted Monty Python and the Holy Grail constituted an incitement to violence.
PJ Media
Soviet sympathisers in the British publishing industry did everything they could to stop Orwell’s Animal Farm being published. Hollywood made mocking the Nazis a taboo until WWII was well under way.
History repeats.
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