[TraceWoodgrains]

Dismiss anything that sounds unusual outright? No. Apply extra scrutiny to things that sound unusual? Absolutely. If they had even googled /r/txbountyhunters, they would have found a rDrama thread early in the results talking about it. If they had looked through the accounts at all, they would have found indications that they weren't conservative pro-life Christians from Texas. Same with the trans one. A number of the pictures were re-used from random sources. Commenters in both often had absurdist/troll-ish usernames, they would make extreme and erratic comments - the signs were all over the place.

More to the point, the satire is obvious because the posts are absurd, over-the-top, and deeply implausible. Spray-painting your baby's mouth and crushing hormone pills to put in your teenager's food, then bragging about it on reddit, are not things people do. Writing a meandering post in southern vernacular about bounty hunting your sex partner is not a thing people do. Do people do insane things sometimes? Yes. But when you want to use a genuinely insane thing as evidence for any sort of political message, you should put more work into it than just assuming whatever outlandish story someone's spinning online that happens to be perfect culture war fuel is truth.

A minimal level of fact-checking and scrutiny would have been enough in this case.

[shitlord]

The funniest part about this is that reddit censors all posts/comments linking to rdrama.net, aiding the trolls. Even if someone wanted to expose the trolling, they couldn't.

[shephardjhon]

The only tangible clue you mentioned that didn't rely on "it sounds absurd" was the fact that it was initially cross posted with r/Drama and I agree with you on that point. If journalists could easily see that, they should have looked into what it was.

If the "joke" is supposed to be similar to what Sacha Baron Cohen does, this isn't enough. Like his Erran Moorad stuff, a reasonable person would look up his claims before sitting in for an interview or "training" with him and asking for 3 year olds to be given guns. In Borat 2, the disguises seemed to be intentionally bad.

Most importantly, at the end of the joke he came out to the world and said it WAS a joke and publicized that it was a joke. What r/Drama is doing is less like a joke and more just ways to basically start a civil war. If they were genuine clowns and cultural critics like Cohen(who is literally a classical clown according to Wisecrack) they would come out and proudly declare it in public.