The Internet Law That Explains Why 2016 Was So Terrible

We will all remember 2016’s
political theater for many reasons: for its exhausting, divisive election, for its memes both dank and dark, for the fact that the country’s first female presidential
candidate won the popular vote by a margin of 2.8 million and still lost the
election to an actual reality show villain.  

But 2016 was also
marked—besieged, even—by Poe’s law, a decade-old internet adage articulated by Nathan Poe, a commentator
on a creationism discussion thread. Building on the observation that “real”
creationists posting to the forum were often difficult to parse from those
posing as creationists, Poe’s law stipulates that online, sincere expressions
of extremism are often indistinguishable from satirical expressions of
extremism.

A prominent example of
Poe’s law in action is the March 2016 contest to name a
British research vessel that cost almost $300 million. Participants railed—perhaps earnestly, perhaps jokingly—against the National Environment Research
Council’s decision to reject the public’s overwhelming support for the name “Boaty
McBoatface.” So too is the April spread of the “Trump Effect” Mass Effect 2 remix video, which
resulted in then-candidate Donald Trump retweeting a video that may or may not have been a satirical effort to frame him as
a xenophobic, fascist villain. June’s popular Harambe meme, in which a gorilla shot dead at the Cincinnati Zoo was embraced
in the service of animal rights advocacy alongside Dadaist absurdity and
straight-up racism, is another. In each case, earnest participation bled into
playful participation, making it difficult to know exactly what was happening.
A ridiculous joke? A pointed attack? A deliberate argument? Maybe all of the
above?  

The rise of the so-called alt-right—a loose amalgamation of white nationalists,
misogynists, anti-Semites, and Islamophobes—provides a more sobering example of
Poe’s law. White nationalist sentiments have metastasized into unequivocal expressions of hate in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory, but
in the early days of the group, it was harder to tell. Participants even
provided Poe’s law justifications when describing their behavior. A March 2016 Breitbart piece claimed the racism espoused by the “young meme brigades” swarming 4chan,
Reddit, and Twitter was ironic play, nothing more, deployed solely to shock the
“older generations” that encountered it. According to Breitbart, those
propagating hate were no more genuinely bigoted than 1980s heavy metal
fans genuinely worshiped Satan. The implication: First of all, shut up,
everyone is overreacting, and simultaneously, do keep talking about us, because overreaction is precisely what we’re
going for.  

Perhaps the best illustration
of this tension is Pepe the Frog, the anti-Semitic cartoon mascot of “hipster Nazi” white nationalism. The meme was ostensibly harnessed in an effort to create “meme magic” through pro-Trump “shitposting” (that is, to ensure a Trump victory by dredging up as much chaos
and confusion as possible). But it communicated a very clear white supremacist
message. The entire point was for it
to be taken seriously as a hate symbol, even if the posters were, as they
insisted, “just trolling”—a distinction we argue is ultimately irrelevant, since regardless of motivations, such
messages communicate, amplify, and normalize bigotry. And normalized bigotry
emboldens further bigotry, as Trump’s electoral victory has made painfully clear.

 Poe’s law also played a
prominent role in Facebook’s fake news problem, particularly in the spread of articles written with the cynical intention of duping Trump supporters through fabrication
and misinformation. Readers may have passed these articles along as gospel
because they really did believe, for example, that an FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton’s private email
server died mysteriously.
Or maybe they didn’t believe it but
wanted to perpetuate the falsehood for a laugh, out of boredom, or simply to
watch the world burn. Each motive equally possible, each equally unverifiable,
and each normalizing and incentivizing the spread of outright lies.

Hence the year’s
plethora of outrageous election conspiracy theories—including the very false claim that Clinton was
running a child sex trafficking ring out of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C.,
pizza restaurant. Pizzagate, as the story came to be known, like so many of the
stories animating this weirdest of all possible elections, has a direct link both to 4chan and r/The_Donald, another hotbed of highly ambivalent pro-Trump activity. It is
therefore very likely that the conspiracy is yet another instance of pro-Trump
shitposting. But even if some participants are “just trolling,” other participants
may approach the story with deadly seriousness—seriousness that precipitated
one Pizzagate crusader to travel from his home in North Carolina to Comet Ping
Pong with an assault rifle in order to conduct his own investigation, by opening fire in the restaurant.

And then there was Trump
himself, whose incessant provocations, insults, self-congratulations and straight-up, demonstrable lies have brought Poe’s law to the highest office of the land.

Take, for example, Trump’s incensed reactions to the
casts of Hamilton and Saturday Night Live, his baseless assertion of widespread voter fraud (in an election he
won), and his unconstitutional claim that flag-burners should be denaturalized or
imprisoned. Are these outbursts designed to distract the press from his almost incomprehensibly tangled economic conflicts of interest? Is he just
using Twitter to yell at the TV? Is he simply that unfamiliar with well-established
constitutional precedent? Is he, and we say this with contempt, “just trolling”?

The same kinds of
questions apply to Trump’s entrée into foreign policy
issues. Did he honestly think the call he took from the president of Taiwan
was nothing more than pleasantries? (His advisers certainly didn’t think so.) Does he sincerely not remember all the times Russian hacking was discussed—all
the times he himself discussed the hacks—before the election? Does he truly believe the Russian hacking story is little more than a
pro-Clinton conspiracy?

It’s unclear what the
most distressing answers to these questions might be.

Poe’s law helps explain
why “fuck 2016” is, at least according to the A.V.
Club, this year’s “definitive meme.” Content
subsumed by Poe’s law is inherently disorienting, not unlike trying to have an
intense emotional conversation with someone wearing dark sunglasses. Not
knowing exactly what you’re looking at, and therefore what to look out for,
obscures how best to respond in a given moment. More vexingly, it obscures what
the implications of that response might be.  

Take Pizzagate. If
proponents of the theory genuinely believe that Clinton is running an underage
sex ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza shop, it makes absolute sense to debunk
the rumor, as often and as loudly as possible. On the other hand, if the story
is a shitpost joke, even to just some of those perpetuating it, then
amplification might ultimately benefit the instigators and further harm those
caught in their crosshairs (in this case both literally and figuratively).  

Further complicating
this picture, each new instance of amplification online, regardless of who is
doing the sharing, and regardless of what posters’ motivations might be, risks
attracting a new wave of participants to a given story. Each of these
participants will, in turn, have similarly inscrutable motives and through
commenting on, remixing, or simply repeating a story might continue its spread
in who knows what directions, to who knows what consequences.

As the above examples
illustrate, the things people say and do online have indelible, flesh-and-blood
implications (looking at you, Paul Ryan). Heading into 2017, it is critical
to strategize ways of navigating a Poe’s law–riddled internet—particularly as
PEOTUS mutates into POTUS.

One
approach available to everyone is to forcefully reject the “just trolling,” “just joking,” and “just saying words” excuses so endemic in
2016. In a given context, you may be “just trolling,” “just joking,” or “just
saying whatever,” because you have the profound luxury of dismissing the embodied impact of your words. It may also be the case
that the people in your immediate circle might get the troll, or joke, or words,
because they share your sense of humor and overall worldview.

But
even if you and your immediate circle can decode your comments, your troll or
joke or words can be swept into the service of something else entirely, for
audiences who know nothing of the context and who have exactly zero interest in
both your sense of humor and overall worldview.

In short, regardless of
anyone’s self-satisfied “don’t blame me, I was just X-ing,” all actions
online have consequences—at least the potential for consequences, intended or
otherwise. So for god’s sake, take your own words seriously.

This article was originally published as part of Future Tense, a
collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways
emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter.