• Maven (famous)@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The Onion is a satire news site. Everything on it is fake and intended as a joke.

      Not the Onion is REAL headlines that look like they could be from a parody news site.

      Ate the Onion is when people see FAKE comedy news and think it’s real.

    • Backspacecentury@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      The onion is a satirical news site. As in they make up stuff to be funny. The term “ate the onion” is when people believe their articles are real news.

      Conversely, notheonion is meant to be examples of things that are absurd enough to seem like satire, but are actually true.

    • blackbelt352@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The Onion is a satirical news site, they’re known for satirizing the sorts of sensationalized news headlines of legacy media in the modern day, setting themselves up as an excellent critique of the absolute absurdity that modern news media can be and just how easily it is to mislead the average person.

      Their headlines are typically wildly outlandish and sarcastic, but sometimes get mistaken for real headlines from actual news sources, which is called Eating the Onion.

      And then sometimes real life is just a satire of itself and a real news source writes an article and headline that is just wildly outlandish people could mistake it for an Onion article, with the realization that this wild news article is not actually from the Onion, hence Not the Onion.