If You Don’t Know If It’s a Joke Or a Lie, What’s It Called?
There is a word.
A TV personality changed his Twitter bio to this.
Those Are Six Falsehoods
No, he hasn’t won an Emmy, graduated from Harvard or Yale, or affiliated with the Aspen Institute—nor does he want to. Culturally and ideologically, he aligns himself far from those institutions.
He’s used his platform to cast skepticism on vaccines and insist it’s his own private business whether he’s vaccinated, to relentlessly mock and discredit trans and nonbinary people, and generally to support Russia over Ukraine.
A Joke or a Lie?
Of course, his updated Twitter bio is sarcasm, irony, a joke. If you don’t get the joke and you’re taken in by the misinformation, then perhaps you could argue it was a lie (disinformation), since its effect was to mislead you. Either way, it’s false at its core. Whether as a joke or a lie, the message operates through its falseness.
Bad Actors Do This to Make Themselves Slippery
If you say that he “lied,” his defender will say he was obviously “joking” and that the falsehoods do not reflect poorly on his character because they are the mechanism of a joke.
