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."
Will create more confusion (Score:5, Interesting)
...than it eliminates. Every time a politician opens their mouth, there will a headline tagged 'satire', and then they'll complain that Facebook is misrepresenting what they said, and then someone will have to explain to the politician what 'satire' actually means.
For example, every 'security' measure of the TSA is a cruel satire, but they are also actual rules that people are really subject to.
Says who? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sad. (Score:3, Interesting)
Where did we go wrong? Sure... "Facebook", but I think it goes back further than that.
Indeed. [wikipedia.org] In other contexts it goes much further back, but for the internet, September 1993 has never been recovered from.
Why the ridicule? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes satire is obvious, sometimes it isn't. In the latter cases, you have to be familiar with the source or familiar with background information. When you are talking about a medium that supports a profound number of sources, it can be difficult to judge whether a source that you are not familiar with is satirical. When you are talking about a medium that can deliver news from all parts of the world from varying perspectives, it can be difficult to have the necessary background information to judge whether a portrayal is satirical. Sites like Facebook only compound that problem because it is not a news site in the traditional sense, nor is it a news aggregator. It is simply a site where people post links, links that may be informative or may be whimsical based upon their mood. Making matters worse, a lot of people don't even know their Facebook "friends" particularly well, which makes it means that you can't even use the source of the link as a guage.
While I do have deep concerns about how Facebook would go about vetting links, I can understand why some people would see this as a valuable feature.
Re:Some people are too stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a good thing that intelligence is not determined by genetics.
Citation needed --- and not to a stupid failed experiment that drew the wrong conclusion.
Yes. I know. It's politically incorrect to think that intelligence does have a genetic component. My anecdotal examples certainly leads my belief that there is a causal relationship.
And no. I'm not saying that genetics is everything; nor am I saying that all children of two intelligent people are intelligent. Anyone who has even the simplest understanding of genetics knows that not all children of brown haired parents have brown hair. But only someone who has baked their brain in a politically correct stew would think there is no genetic component.