It happens often that some image, video or post goes viral on Facebook only for us to find out a couple of days later that the entire thing was a hoax. There are certain websites out there that exclusively publish satire that is so cleverly written that some poor souls mistake those articles for the truth. In order to remove confusion Facebook has now started testing a new ‘satire’ tag so that users know what they’re reading is meant to be taken in a lighter vein.
This was first discovered by Ars Technica and found to be true for articles going out to The Onion, a popular satire website. Once a user clicks through to an article on The Onion, Facebook would then automatically tag all related articles with the “satire” tag.
The world’s largest social network confirmed this test, adding that it is being run on a small scale right now because feedback from users revealed that they wanted a more clear way to distinguish between satirical articles and legitimate articles.
Though it has been noted that for now the tag isn’t applying to all websites that produce this sort of content and it also appears to be limited only to related articles headlines for now. If Facebook receives enough feedback to convince itself that this test is working as expected then perhaps it would expand the scope and the number of websites covered.
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