Facebook is testing a "satire" tag so that users do not get confused about the authenticity when they see certain headlines on the News feed.
Several satirical news publications like The Onion are known for their nearly believable headlines like "Tips For Being An Unarmed Black Teen," which will come across as fake to any individual who applies common sense. However, Facebook seems to think otherwise as the social networking site is testing the "satire" tag to avoid people taking articles literally even though they are a play on societal notions of stereotypes and are meant to be humorous and sardonic.
However, the auto-tagging by Facebook is not applicable for all spoof-oriented sites and per ARS Techina's Sam Machkoveck, is only valid for "related" article headlines. Machkovech made the discovery that some articles in his "related" section of the feed were prefaced with "Satire."
So how does the tagging by Facebook operate you ask? To illustrate, your friend posts a link to an Onion article on their Facebook feed and you check it out. Once you've clicked on the link via Facebook and are done with reading the article you would return to your browser. It is then that you notice that Facebook has generated three "related articles" below the article link you clicked on. In the even the link was from The Onion, then the box will have another suggested article from the parody site but have the disclaimer tag "satire" in brackets.
Interestingly, ClickHole - another parody site by Onion Inc. - escapes the satire auto tagging by Facebook in the articles. This is a reflection that the tagging by Facebook is somewhat inconsistent at this juncture.
When Facebook was contacted to shed light on the new feature, the social networking site revealed that it was testing the tags for a month now. However, per Facebook the auto-tagging is not restricted to news stories from The Onion alone.
"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," revealed a Facebook representative to ARS Techina.
Whether Facebook will discontinue with the tagging in the long term or make it a permanent fixture is not known.
