He turns up at actual protests, or simply in rush hour traffic, carrying signs that bear messages like "PIGEONS ARE LIARS" and throwing off one-liners like, "Your filming me doesn't scare me, the birds do that to me every day anyway!"Īs part of his persona, McIndoe leverages the news media's penchant for doing " both sides" coverage, which is often prevalent on issues that don't have two legitimate "sides" - a phenomenon critics refer to as false balance. McIndoe impressively commits to the bit while out in public, and his videos are legitimately funny. While there are many satirical jokes made on the internet about us, we are not satirical and consider this labeling harmful to our cause." Is the Satire Actually Funny? When asked about news articles that describe the movement as satirical, McIndoe told Snopes by email, "Our movement has been co-opted by internet trolls and people out to delegitimize us. Present-day McIndoe, thus, claimed it was a staffer who wrote that post, and that staffer has since been removed.Īdministrators for the Ohio and the New York chapters of Birds Aren't Real flat out told the Daily Beast the movement is, in the words of Birds Aren't Real Ohio, a "satirical approach to counteracting such far-fetched conspiracies (such as flat earthers)." He now publicly commits fully to his character, a man who fervently believes birds are government spy-drones and travels the country spreading his message. now there's a facebook so the moms of the current ‘bird truthers’ can be in on it too." But it also captures the zeitgeist of Gen Z, who have grown up in a social-media-driven information ecosystem, in which facts have become partisan footballs.Įvidencing the movement's satirical motives, the Daily Beast dug up a Facebook post from the movement's founder, Peter McIndoe, who in 2017 posted, "i made a satirical movement a few months ago, and people on instagram seem to like it a lot. Is It Satire?īased on our review of social media accounts and various analyses of Birds Aren't Real, it seems safe to say that the movement is satire that skewers real conspiracy movements that are built on similarly far-fetched beliefs. We'll explain what we've learned about it below. The Birds Aren't Real movement was probably best described in 2018 by journalist Rachel Roberts as "a joke that thousands of people are in on." What makes it unique is that it was built from the ground up.
"I'd love to know if it's satire or if these people are actually that deluded," another reader inquired. "Is this movement a real thing or a hoax?" one Snopes reader asked. So what is it? Is it a conspiracy theory or is it a joke? That seems to be the question surrounding the so-called Birds Aren't Real movement.
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