Social notworking site Facebook is so worried that people have been posting bogus stories as truth that it is experimenting with a satire tag.
The problem is that – generally speaking – people in America can’t tell the difference between a news story with the headline “New Study Finds Humans Shouldn’t Spend More Than 5 Consecutive Hours Together” and a real scientific study.
To be fair it is tricky to spot the difference. The woman who posted a story which claimed that turmeric was the perfect cure for Ebola was being serious as were the posts which claimed vaccines were full of mercury and give kids autism.
It has not helped that some US publications cannot tell the difference between satire and just “making stuff up” so these very unfunny or dim stories are easily confused with fact.
All that could be outdated, however, as Facebook is currently testing the infamous “satire” tag that will distinguish fake news from the real deal. If you click on an Onion article, for example, Facebook would then automatically tag related articles with the aforementioned “satire” text in the headline. Sadly, this does not apply to the Daily Mail articles which are still being presented as true.
Facebook said that it is all in the testing stage and the idea came from feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units.
