The social network is concerned that some people can’t tell real news from the ones published on sites like The Onion, fact that determined it to implement a new tag: “Satire.”
If I’m not mistaken, a news network picked up at some point some information that had been published on The Onion and passed it to its audience as real data. Such cases gave the rest of us a good laugh, but Facebook means to put an end to that, in a move that suggests that the social network thinks its users are stupid. The new “Satire” tag will precede the titles of articles from The Onion and other (currently unknown) websites.
In a statement issued to Ars Technica, a Facebook spokesperson mentioned that “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. This is because we received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units.”
Statements like this one make you wonder who gives this kind of feedback to Facebook. It’s good to know that the Satire tag won’t be slapped to The Onion articles by default, though. It’ll only appear on related articles, after visiting a The Onion article that has been previously shared by one of your friends. While this means that for the time being the tag isn’t very intrusive, it also gives the world an idea about how low of an IQ the world has in Facebook’s eyes.
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