Here for your amusement is a collection of Facebook postings by people who don’t seem to understand that The Onion is fake news.  Now, remember that The Onion is satire.  And a piece of satire works best when it bears some resemblance to the object of satire.  If a story in The Onion were not believed to be true by anybody then that would be a clear indication that it was poor satire.  In other words, the credibility of a story in The Onion is optimally chosen so that inevitably a minimal fraction of people will believe it.

So it should not be amusing that some people fall for stories in The Onion, anymore than it is amusing that the Sun rises on Wednesdays. What would be amusing is finding out exactly who it is that lives in that tail of the gullibility distribution. However the web site is anonymized. So to me what is amusing about all of this is discovering  how many exactly which people find this site amusing.

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