Look, he said it was posted on a satirical site, I said, “Thanks for the heads up.”

Yes, if someone says something “might” be satire, I will self-censor to avoid looking silly. I don’t need to confirm that he is right to self-censor myself. If someone says, “Don’t go there, you’ll fall off a cliff,” I’ll probably say, “Thanks. Now I know not to go there” whether or not it’s true.

You have totally missed my point all along. I’ve spotted lots of satire recently, so whenever anyone sends out “satire alert” it stops me in my tracks before posting. I don’t feel I have go confirm the alert to stop posting.

If you really want to get into this, we can talk about the effect of increasing skepticism when people post satire as reality. Yes, I’ve run into enough fake stories that my default is to question everything. Somehow you want to defend yourself over this because I said “thank you” to someone who said “satire.” Why are you taking this so personally? It was my side conversation with someone, just like I might have in the comments of a Facebook post. I wasn’t talking to you. That’s okay here, is it not?

I still haven’t found any background on the story because now I have started to look for it. That’s not to say it isn’t true but I have ended up trying to do my own fact-checking after all. So now I am putting in the time to verify it because people are asking me here why I accepted his view that it might be satire rather than your view that it was true. Surprisingly there is very little on this story. There’s an incomplete blurb on the Private Eye site and in Google there’s mostly there’s just references to this Techdirt story. It’s taken on a life of its own because of these comments back and forth, but no verification that I can nail down yet. It’s an echo chamber effect so far. Maybe someone can do some more fact checking on it.

I have, over recent months, begun to learn which sites to laugh at rather than accept as truth. The Onion I’ve known all along. There’s also a faux Christian site and a military satire site. Being in America, I don’t know Private Eye, but now I know a bit more about it.