Poe’s law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.[1][2][3]
Origin
Poe’s law is based on a comment written by Nathan Poe in 2005 on christianforums.com, an Internet forum on Christianity. The message was posted during a debate on creationism, where a previous poster had remarked to another user: “Good thing you included the winky. Otherwise people might think you are serious”.[4]
The reply by Nathan Poe read:[1]
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article.
Can be hard to tell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
Apparently this was the original post:
https://old.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to_github_and_i_have_lots_to_say/
And then someone saw it on Reddit and created an issue on the sherlock project over it:
https://github.com/sherlock-project/sherlock/issues/2011