“These English are crazy!” “Siphoned, they all become siphoned!” “Asterix and Wokelix”several Internet users are alarmed by sharing a tweet from the journalist Lucas Jakubowicz announcing that “the publishing house which publishes Asterix and Obelix in English will retouch the albums to hide the roast boars and hunting scenes, symbols of animal abuse for some. It also considers the dwarfism and obesity of the two heroes to be ‘problematic'”, he adds. But all of that is wrong. Route of a hoax gone wrong.
The publishing house that publishes Asterix and Obelix in English will retouch the albums to hide roasted boars and hunting scenes, symbols of animal abuse for some.
She also considers “problematic” the dwarfism and obesity of the two heroes. pic.twitter.com/hi1h0vVs8h
— Lucas Jakubowicz (@lucas_jaku) March 2, 2023
RN elected officials trapped
The story begins Thursday, March 2. Political journalist Lucas Jakubowicz, editor-in-chief of Decision Makers Magazine, invents this false information from scratch and publishes it on Twitter without specifying that it is a joke. His tweet looks exactly like those that journalists do when they reveal information on the social network, with a red circle at the start to challenge Internet users.
If some remain skeptical after reading his tweet, others believe in it directly and share it, including several elected officials from the National Rally. “But shut them up!”exclaimed party spokesman Julien Odoul. “It is more and more difficult to live in this new world that is trying to be imposed on us: intolerance, self-proclaimed self-righteousness, demagoguery, permanent judgment…”reacts RN deputy Kevin Mauvieux in a tweet now deleted, but spotted by France Inter. “Promoting cisgender heterosexual white Gauls as the indigenous people of France is already fascist in itself. Everything has to be changed. Any ideas?”comments, sarcastically, the vice-president of the RN group at the Île-de-France regional council Aymeric Durox, in a tweet also now deleted.
The hoax caused so much noise that the French publishing house finally denied the information to the Parisian.
The works of Iam Flemming and Roald Dahl rewritten
Less gullible Internet users wonder about the relevance of making such a hoax when you are a journalist, but Lucas Jakubowicz assumes. Asked by Le Parisien, he said he had “the teasing spirit” and do “one hoax a year” for which he “try to be in the news and find the most credible idea possible”. The political journalist explains that he wanted “denouncing censorship, wokism ambient” whose “partisans are dangerous people who do not realize that they are thus taking the path of totalitarianism”.
Word wokism, from the United States and meaning “awake”, is used in France mainly by people located on the right or even on the extreme right of the political spectrum to discredit the struggles against discrimination, but the real existence of a such current of thought is debated. For Lucas Jakubowicz, it does exist.
As proof, he created his joke based on real facts, because it is true that, in recent times, very well-known works have begun to be rewritten a little in the Anglo-Saxon world, to the point that the author of the satanic versesSalman Rushdie, himself a victim of censorship and targeted by a fatwa for this novel, denounced a “absurd censorship”.
The latest examples of these rewrites are the removal of racist passages from Ian Flemming’s spy novels featuring james bond. Or, at the end of February, the replacement of certain words deemed “offensive” in Roald Dahl’s children’s books. The expression “crazy thing” become “weird thing” so as not to stigmatize mental illnesses. Character “enormously big” is now fair “enormous”.
Difficult to deny false information
So even if, as we all know, Obelix isn’t big, the hoax was still particularly believable, especially in the eyes of those who believe that all this is due to the wokism. The hoax relied on what is called “confirmation bias” where people tend to believe what proves the opinions they already have. And it is also this confirmation bias that makes the joke tenacious and makes it difficult to deny false information. Four days after its publication, some Internet users still believe in it. Others, who believed in it, recognize that it was false. In addition, MP Julien Odoul has still not deleted his tweet.
Finally, the story took another turn during the weekend, Internet users, rather from the far right, who did not like being deceived, began to attack journalist Lucas Jakubowicz. He who wanted to denounce the wokismhas since received insults and antisemitic messages.