After Senator Antonio Trillanes IV’s BBC interview with anchor Stephen Sackur, with netizens talking about the senator’s response to Sackur’s questions with divided reactions, another satirical piece came out about how he is planning on staging a two-day coup d’etat to prove the BBC wrong.
[ads2]
The article was published by satirical website The Adobo Chronicles and was one of the site’s recent satirical pieces about Trillanes, the first of which we explained as satire after it was copied by another website and passed off as legit news. It was about Trillanes planning to sue BBC news.
[ads1]
Adobo Chronicles wrote that in order to save his ego after Sackur scoffed when he read about Trillanes’ day-long coups during previous administrations, he is going to “stage a comeback” by pulling off a coup for 48 hours. It added that Trillanes would apply for a patent to change the name of the illegal substance “shabu” to “marijuana” after he claimed during the BBC interview that the Filipinos’ preferred marijuana over shabu.
It is clear that a satirical piece is not meant to be taken seriously and Adobo Chronicles’ disclaimers about how it is a satirical site that makes an effort in helping its readers distinguish fact from fiction with its new format.
Taking this into account, just look at the fictional bits in regular font and the fact in italics in this satirical piece.
It is obvious then that any plan of a two-day coup from Trillanes and his camp is fictional and should not be taken seriously at all.
However, the comments on its Facebook post showed how netizens still took this article about Trillanes and his plans for a coup as real news when it’s not.
This is not the first time that people mistook a satirical article for real news since many people end up reading only the title, reading the article while neglecting any available disclaimer or believing in the article without verifying its claims first. A few articles before have pointed out how Filipinos seem to have trouble in distinguishing the truth from satire when they read one.
[ads3]
