Representational image. / Reuters

Washington, United States

Did a Donald Trump supporter burn down his house while igniting an LGBTQ flag? Did a conservative think tank recommend "period passports" to monitor pregnancies? Was Kamala Harris's running mate dissed by his own state's professional football team?

Do not be fooled. This is satire.

But it is no laughing matter.

These claims were widely mistaken as real across social media, underscoring how content from satirical websites is being repurposed to fuel political misinformation and sow confusion ahead of the Nov.5 presidential election.

The nonprofit News Literacy Project (NLP) calls such misinformation "stolen satire" -- plucking satirical content from its original context and presenting it as accurate information without a clear disclaimer.

"People who aren't in on the joke take it at face value," Hannah Covington, a senior director at NLP, told AFP.

Ahead of the National Football League regular season, social media users falsely claimed the Minnesota Vikings had denounced Tim Walz, the state's governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate, questioning his leadership.

But the Vikings had issued no such statement.

AFP's fact-checkers found that the falsehood stemmed from the Facebook page of America's Last Line of Defense, a network of parody websites run by Christopher Blair.

The group clarifies that "nothing on this page is real."

Blair said his target audience shares such claims because they "fit with their confirmation-biased narrative of the world."

"They don't necessarily share them because they believe them," Blair told AFP.

"Whether or not a thing is true no longer matters to about 35 million Americans. If it's what they want to hear, they'll pass it along."

'Weaponized misinformation'

Such humorous fiction –- peddled by both sides of the political aisle -- often makes the internet erupt with laughter, but researchers are not laughing about its potential to fool the public.

"Sharing weaponized misinformation in the form of lazy jokes has quickly come to define the developing presidential campaign between" Trump and Vice President Harris, tech writer Casey Newton wrote in an online commentary.

"Across social networks, Democrats and Republicans are flooding the feed with obviously untrue statements about one another and calling it a joke."

Some viral posts falsely claimed that an Iowa-based fan of "Make America Great Again" -- the political movement and slogan popularized by Trump -- had mistakenly burned his house down while attempting to incinerate an LGBTQ flag.

The man was ridiculed as "stupid" and "homophobic."

But AFP found that the claim originated in satire.

Other posts falsely claimed that Project 2025, a set of policy proposals by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, recommends mandating that women carry "period passports" to monitor their menstrual cycle and pregnancies.

The Heritage Foundation, widely considered aligned with Trump's agenda, told AFP that the claim was "absolutely false."

The Halfway Post, founded by the political satirist Dash MacIntyre, first published both claims.

'Outrage into clicks'

MacIntyre, who said Trump's election in 2017 inspired him to start his satire company, insisted that he was not trying to "proliferate fake news" but that politicians deserve lampooning in a climate of "political insanity."

"It's not really my fault that if I fictionalize alleged incidents involving Trump to critique and satirize his awful personality... so many viewers take it seriously," he told AFP.

"There are always gullible and low-information people, but I don't think that means satirical comedy doesn't belong" on social media, he added.

But when passively scrolling the internet, such posts without labels or context may look real, the NLP's Covington said, adding that some clout-chasing actors were exploiting the trend to "convert outrage into clicks."

Elon Musk, owner of the platform X who has endorsed Trump, recently courted criticism for sharing a deepfake video in which a voiceover mimicking Harris declared that she does not "know the first thing about running the country."

The video was originally posted by an X account that labeled it as a "parody," but Musk's repost made no such disclosure.

"Clear and consistent practices like watermarking something as satire is so important to help preserve its original context," Covington said.

"Most platforms do not have any real policies they consistently enforce around this kind of content, so it's up to us as consumers to verify before sharing."