Guide
How to tell real news from satire
Every headline in Hoaxle was really published. Some by news outlets, some by satire sites. Here is how good players tell them apart, and why it is harder than it looks.
1. Ask who would write it, and why
Satire exists to make a point. The joke usually lands on someone with power, a habit everybody shares, or a trend. If a headline only works as a punchline against a target, that is a hint. Real news exists to report an event, so it names a place, a number, a date, or an official source.
2. Look for the specific, boring detail
Real headlines carry the dull details that make a story checkable: "council", "£2.3m", "on Tuesday", "according to police". Satire tends to stay general ("Area man", "Nation's dads", "Report:") because it is about a type of person, not a person.
3. Watch the tone, not the topic
A strange topic proves nothing. Real life is strange, and whole news desks exist to report the odd parts of it. Tone is a better clue. Satire often sounds calm about something absurd ("Scientists confirm…") or absurd about something mundane.
4. Know the house styles
Each satire outlet has a voice. The Onion writes deadpan wire-service copy. The Daily Mash and NewsThump write British, often political jokes. Reductress parodies women's magazines; The Hard Times parodies music press; The Beaverton and The Shovel do Canada and Australia. Learn the voices and you will spot them.
5. Real outlets write odd headlines on purpose
Many real stories come from "odd news" desks (UPI Odd News, Sky News Strange, NPR) and from the r/nottheonion community, which collects real headlines that sound like satire. These are the hardest: they are real, and they were picked because they sound fake.
6. Why this matters
Satire is fine; it is a centuries-old craft. The problem starts when a satirical headline is shared without its source and taken as fact, or when a real story is dismissed as "obviously a joke". The habit this game trains (stop, think about the source, check before you share) works on every feed.
How we pick headlines
Our pipeline collects headlines from established satire outlets and reputable news outlets, removes anything cruel or about tragedies, and picks the ones a simple text classifier finds hardest to call. Each answer links to the original article. See About for more.