dtgreene: (So, for example, a "joke" about killing Jewish people, for example, would not be acceptable.)
It always depend on context, unfortunately on the internet
there is none. Yes, "humour" is often used in propaganda and in bullying for many reasons : the pleasure of laughter (like many other emotions) lowers cognitive defenses, and caricature allows for plausible deniability ("i didn't mean it", usually covering "i didn't mean it that far, but I mean the general idea and the premises that make the joke work"). But you can also find contexts where the same joke is used in reverse - becoming a caricature of a caricatural discourse and denouncing its ridicule. The line between a racist rant and its satire is a matter of shared background understanding. "Who speaks", "for whom", with what assumed agreement. Again, none of these agreements work at a large scale (which is one reason why the old Charlie Hebdo struggles to define itself nowadays : its public is too diverse for its jokes' meanings to stay well defined).
All this means that moderators have to take in account a lot of implicit, deliberately invisible or denied, factors. They are most of times (not always) pretty obvious beyond the author's denegations (because the author himself requires this obviousness, even if he then plays on formal technicalities, strangely hoping that his target public will be the only ones who won't be duped), but they will always offer material for bad faith arguments. Mods will be like judges having to navigate between the letter and the spirit of a rule, in front of people who'll more or less obfuscate the intent.
In the end, it'll all rest, on a case basis, on Fables22's own intelligence. Maybe she'll make the job easier by enforcing banket rules (some forums preemptively short-circuit such arguments by specifying "
Not even ironically, not even for laughs" in their rules), maybe she'll take the risk to be more accurate than that, which will require solid shoulders ("i didnt mean it lol" - "yes you did, end of line"). It'll be a choice of strategy, with pros and cons. And potential collateral damages (but futile enough that it doesn't really matter - we can indeed sacrifice super meta jokes in that forum if it truly helps).
But the objective reality, no matter how closely the rules will try to follow its outline, is more complicated. There is no universal objective (decontextualized) humour "acceptability".
When tasked to perform a comedic speech in a show where the extreme-right leader Le Pen was the day's guest, Pierre Desproges (one of the best humans ever) famously said "Yes we can laugh about everything -we must laugh about everything- but not with everyone". It's now become a well-known saying in France, to the point of becoming a cliché. But its truth runs quite deep.