Report: Facebook testing ‘satire’ tag

Report: Facebook testing ‘satire’ tag

Facebook claims the tag is by request.

Ars Technica recently discovered that Facebook is testing a “satire” tag for stories from parody news sources like the Onion.

While some might find it insulting that the social network believes its users are too dumb to distinguish between real news and fake, Facebook claims the tag is by request.

“We are running a small test which shows the text ‘[Satire]’ in front of links to satirical articles in the related articles unit in News Feed.” a Facebook representative told Ars Technica. “This is because we received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units.”

Facebook says it is not just the Onion receiving the satire tag, but it has not yet provided any sort of list of sites affected. According to Ars Technica, the Onion sibling site and Buzzfeed parody, Clickhole, appeared to escape the tag.

Users will only see the tag in the “related articles” box.  Specifically, after following a link shared by a friend to an Onion story, Facebook will generate three related articles in the box directly below the linked Onion article. If any of those articles are also from the Onion, that article’s headline will begin with the word “satire” in brackets.

Weirdly, Facebook will not tag posts on friends’ feeds, or the Onion’s official Facebook page. Likewise, articles saved to a read-later list will not be tagged either.

The test has been ongoing for about a month.

 

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