Facebook Tests "Satire" Tag To Avoid Confusion On News Feed 131
An anonymous reader writes "In an attempt to keep you from having to explain to your crazy relatives that despite what they read, Vice President Biden *didn't* get a grow light delivered to the White House under a fake name, Facebook is testing a "satire" tag on news feeds. A Facebook representative issued the following statement to Ars Technica: "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."
Re:Some people are too stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people are too stupid to breathe. Or breed.
The stupid people appear to breed quite well. It's the neckbeards with the Cheetos-stained fingers that are unsucessful at breeding.
Daily Currant (Score:5, Insightful)
I just wish people would stop linking to Daily Currant articles. Their version of "Satire" is posting articles that aren't funny, but ARE plausible, just to incite a reaction. Its not like The Onion where the humor is usually right in the headline.
I wouldn't have a problem with it if they were skilled writers and I cracked up laughing while reading the article. Except its crap like "Sarah Palin: âEat Less Chinese Foodâ(TM) to Reduce Trade Deficit" or "Hilary: I'm running!"
I wouldn't be surprised if Sarah Palin said something like that, and I wouldn't be surprised if Hilary Clinton was running for president. Except there's no humor in fabricating plausible stories.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Says who? (Score:2, Insightful)
And who determines if the content at that URL is satirical in nature? Facebook? Looks like they've merely added that "tag" for all URLs from the Onion.
Let's face it, the Onion is a well known satyrical news site and there is no real confusion about it's satyrical nature for most open minded people with a well developed sense of humor. However conservatives, being rather closed minded and prone to panicking, seem to be unable to tell the difference between satyrical news sites like the Onion and real news. What originally tipped the scales and caused Facebook to launch this project was an incident during the Bush administration where the administration spent vast amounts of money planning the invasion Nukehavistan [theonion.com]. Eventually somebody clued the White House in on the joke but by then they had already invaded Afghanistan. Another interesting fact bit about the satire tag is that it has taken Facebook nine years of intensive development and testing to develop ... a 'tag'.