Throughout the satire trials of 2015 I had resisted the idea that one person’s satire is another’s propaganda. I insisted that satire was speech in something like a grammatical mood of its own, as different from the declarative as the declarative is from the interrogative, and that it was therefore subject to its own rules. But in this judgment I was mostly considering established print media, venues such as Charlie Hebdo that practically announced their own satirical nature as a disclaimer.

By the following year, however, I began to notice the way in which new media blur the line between satire and propaganda. Alt-right personalities were now gleefully acknowledging that their successes in meme warfare relied precisely on the inability of media consumers to distinguish between the sincere and the jocular, between an ironic display of a swastika and a straightforward one.

At the same time artificial intelligence was increasingly producing texts and images that, whether overtly political or not, contributed to the general sense that we cannot possibly know the ends for which media content is being churned out. There are for example Facebook accounts that do nothing but show images of celebrities with deadpan captions mistaking them for other celebrities: Betty White for Queen Elizabeth, Samuel Jackson for Kofi Annan. Are these satire? No one is called upon to say. They may well be generated by bots, and you cannot possibly discern the intentions of machines that have no intentions. Their cumulative effect, anyhow, is to make media consumers less certain of their grasp on reality.

Lurking in the darker shadows beyond these strange new phenomena, there are porn sites with the faces of celebrities grafted onto the bodies of others; and there are, or will be soon, deep fakes of politicians accepting another sort of graft. There are distortions at a level of intensity and verisimilitude that we could not possibly have imagined in 2002, all being generated, in the end, in the aim of gaining notice and money.

Over the past few years I have been made to see, in sum, that the nature and extent of satire is not nearly as simple a question as I had previously imagined. I am now prepared to agree that some varieties of expression that may have some claim to being satire should indeed be prohibited. I note this not with a plan or proposal for where or how such a prohibition might be enforced, but to acknowledge something I did not fully understand until I experienced it first hand — that even the most cherished and firmly-held values or ideals can change when the world in which those values were first formed changes.

I hate to have to say this, and I feel that while it is an admission necessitated by the changing times, it also could not come at a worse time. The madness of 2015 has not subsided. In an astounding article in the British newspaper The Independent in February, Sean O’Grady attempted to stoke the decades-old fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his satirical take on the life of Muhammad in “The Satanic Verses.” “Rushdie’s silly, childish book,” the columnist writes, “should be banned under today’s anti-hate legislation. It’s no better than racist graffiti on a bus stop.” O’Grady proudly admits that he has never read the book, and in this he is just like the Ayatollah Khomeini before him.

Is my own belated acknowledgment of the need to regulate satire an unwitting discovery of common cause with the likes of O’Grady? I certainly hope not. O’Grady belongs to what seems to be an increasingly common species of moral coward, a dupe of totalitarians, spiritual brother of the Charlie Hebdo assassins, whereas I am only trying to respond to the real threats of hitherto unimagined technologies. “The Satanic Verses,” I tell myself, is literature, where free play of the imagination is the rule of the game and the inalienable right of the creator. Twitter is, well, something else.

But the truth is I am not at all sure of this distinction. The truth is that the nature and proper scope of satire remain an enormous problem, one that is not going to get any easier to resolve in the political and technological future we can all, by now, see coming.

Justin E.H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot, and the author of the “Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason.”

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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