When you live, as we do, in a Clown World, the line between satire and reality is hopelessly blurred. We need only read a Babylon Bee article, and watch it become actual news within the week, to know that.
Just to drive the point home, “fact checkers” have felt it necessary to “fact check” the Bee’s satire. Indeed, yours truly has also had the surreal experience of being “fact checked” over an obvious joke — in this case, my Photoshop of Jacinda Ardern hugging a Mongrel Mob gang member. (To be fair, apparently some social media users took it as gospel, too, which if nothing else is a compliment to my Photoshop skills, I guess.)
The limits of satire and Photoshop are also being tested in the Australian election.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has found placards falsely depicting independent candidates David Pocock and Zali Steggall as members of the Greens political party are in breach of the Commonwealth’s Electoral Act.
Looking at the image, it’s hard to see how anyone would mistake it for anything but parody. Certainly, the AEC didn’t think so — at first.
Mr Pocock lodged a formal complaint with the AEC last month, when signs — featuring him opening his shirt in a “Superman pose” to reveal a T-shirt with a Greens logo — started popping up across Canberra.
At the time, the AEC said its preliminary view was that the corflutes did not breach political advertising laws.
But the AEC has since done a complete u-turn. Mostly, it seems, in the face of an orchestrated campaign of whingeing from the teal independents and their plutocratic puppet-masters. Not to mention the obvious fact that the satirical images were starting to have real bite.
Now, the AEC has said the signs — which were also used against Ms Steggall in the Sydney electorate of Warringah — were misleading and should not be displayed […]
AEC spokesman Evan Ekin-Smyth said while the independent body initially formed the preliminary view that the ads were allowed under the Act, in the time since, the signage had increased in frequency and the election campaign was now in its final stages.
“We’ve [also] had a lot of elector contact about potential confusion and, really importantly, they’ve been in close proximity to an early voting centre,” he said […]
The AEC said Advance Australia did not agree with the finding, but had agreed not to display the signage to avoid bringing on legal proceedings.
To be fair to the AEC, the images were not clearly labelled “satire” or “digitally altered image”, which is basic practice these days. It’s why, for instance, my Ardern image was clearly watermarked and captioned (although whoever uploaded it to social media cropped out the watermark). On the other hand, it seems likely that, given the pressure and financial clout of the teal independents, the AEC would have been subjected to a sustained campaign of complaint, either way.
Mr Pocock said he had received hundreds of emails, calls and messages from people across the ACT who were outraged and confused by the advertising […]
“Clearly, it shows just how much work we need to do in terms of truth in political advertising. It shouldn’t be on voters to have to wade through the nonsense and lies come election time,” he said.
MSN
If it really is true that Pocock’s voter base was “confused” by an obviously satirical image, what it says more than anything is how stupid bourgeois green types really are.
