Should We All Be Taking ‘Irony Poisoning’ More Seriously? Pepe the Frog, which became an ironic mascot for white nationalism and then for actual white nationalism, appears in this still image from a New York Times video, “The Rise of the Ironic Racist.” This summer, our reporting on Facebook’s links to real-world violence led us to Hagen, a quiet town in Germany’s liberal but post-industrial northwest, for a meeting with Gerhard Pauli, a local prosecutor. At one point in the interview, Mr. Pauli, who is warm, grandfatherly and bears more than a passing resemblance to Matlock, retrieved a heavy binder from storage. It contained hundred of pages, each with a message or meme that the police had pulled from the cellphone of a young man who, seemingly out of the blue, had tried to set a local refugee house on fire. The young man lived much of his life online, where he slid slowly and privately into extremism. It had begun as a joke. He and a friend would share racist memes to provoke and shock one another. Over time, the shock value wore off and the hate became sincere. “They found themselves joking, addressing one another as ‘mein Führer’ and such,” Mr. Pauli said, shaking his head. “There’s a very small distance between joke and real.” There was, we told him, a term for this: irony poisoning. Though Mr. Pauli had never heard it before — it is used almost exclusively by young, English-speaking social media addicts — he immediately laughed in recognition of the idea. “Yes, that’s very good,” he said, adding excitedly that Sigmund Freud had proposed something similar. This was Germany, after all. On inspection, it’s not clear that Freud ever actually proposed anything like irony poisoning. That seems telling: though this feels like an old idea, it is largely a new one, emerging from the increasingly destructive ways that we use social media. So we are making a plea to scholars, readers and Silicon Valley elites: take irony poisoning seriously. Yes, at the moment the concept is seen as little more than another bit of self-referential young person slang, used only in the deepest recesses of the web. As best we can tell, it has never appeared in an academic journal or study. It had certainly never appeared in The New York Times until our story this week, on new research suggesting that Facebook helped to drive anti-refugee violence in Germany. But irony poisoning should be entered, we think, into the pantheon of social science concepts that are used to rigorously measure, study and perhaps one day understand how social media platforms can rewire your brain and alter society. Few people who use social media enough to know the phrase would ever deign to define it — doing so would be far too earnest, far too self-serious. So we will offer, as a starting point, informal definitions for the two related but somewhat distinct ways that the phrase is used. Under what we might call the soft form of irony poisoning, heavy social media users become a little bit too engrossed in the ironic detachment that defines online humor and discourse. “To acknowledge both their addiction to the internet and the mind-warping effects of that dependency, a subset of Extremely Online millennials frame their issue as an illness,” Miles Klee, an author, wrote earlier this year. That ironic detachment, cultivated deliberately online, can come to dominate one’s offline worldview as well. Our colleague Amanda Hess once wrote a great piece at Slate on how teens came to love September 11 jokes — an extreme and widespread expression of ironic detachment that began on social media. See also Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker story on teen vaping culture, in which even this addictive habit, for all its consequence, is acceptable only as a performance of irony. “You’re expected to Juul, but you’re expected to not depend on it,” one college kid told Ms. Tolentino, referring to a popular vaping brand. “If you’re cool, then you Juul with other people, and you post about it, so everyone will see that you’re social and ironic and funny. But, if you’re addicted, you go off by yourself and Juul because you need it, and everyone knows.” Vaping, in the story, comes across as a physical manifestation of irony poisoning. Users self-administer mild doses of poison — alienating memes online, nicotine vapors offline — as a way to both reject and cope with the unironic hardships of reality. “People definitely stress-Juul. But everything we do is like Tide Pods,” another student told Ms. Tolentino, referring to a viral meme encouraging users to consume laundry detergent pods. “Everyone in this generation is semi-ironically, like, We’re ready to die.” That brings us to what could be termed the hard form of irony poisoning. Whereas, in the soft form, ironic vaping and September 11 jokes become real addiction and distancing from history, in the hard form, extreme political ideas slide from ironic jokes into earnestly held beliefs. You show your ironic detachment by deliberately violating taboos, namely by expressing forbidden ideas — say, white supremacism. At first, anyway. “The upshot of the condition is that it becomes hard to separate your jokes from your beliefs,” Mr. Klee wrote. Ironic extremism, the theory goes, can become sincere extremism. It’s not that users simply forget they were joking, exactly. Rather, maybe prolonged exposure to extremist ideas, along with provocative jokes meant to play on the sense of taboo, erodes that taboo. Social media irony doesn’t so much turn people extremist as lower their defenses. That gets to an important caveat — it’s not clear how important social media is to any irony poisoning. Maybe there’s something about social media that enables the process, or maybe it just happens to play out there sometimes. Ironic extremism can also provide an opportunity for real extremists to smuggle in their ideas, as Ms. Hess explained in the opening lines to her fantastic video on Pepe the Frog, the unofficial mascot of social media white nationalists: “Pepe was a stoner cartoon frog. Then he became an internet legend. Then he became an ironic Nazi. And then actual neo-Nazis realized that they could promote their sincere white supremacists beliefs by remixing them with ironic Nazi memes, and spread them further than they’ve ever spread before.” We could call this operationalized hard irony poisoning, in which malicious actors willfully exploit the dynamics of passive irony poisoning in order to normalize their ideas and recruit everyday web users. (Are we serious with these made-up academic terms? Are we being ironic? Not even we can say anymore.) But we should emphasize that these are all just a bunch of theories, in the most non-scientific sense of the word. They’re widely held but rarely articulated among certain subsets of web users, which is hardly the same as empirical evidence. Some enterprising social scientist, maybe one who follows this newsletter, should consider testing it for real.