It seems that as more time passes, the social media juggernaut Facebook continues to tighten its grasp on its regulation of content. The all-encompassing site seems to continue to police the world of social media, confirming the regulations of the site are akin to the wild, wild west. Without any real rules in place, Facebook seems to make up their own rules as it continues to grow exponentially. However, the latest wrinkle in the Facebook strategy has to do with one of the most beloved satirical publications in the country: The Onion.
The Madison, Wisconsin-based publication has been delighting fans for decades with its hilarity and tongue-in-cheek commentary. However, now that the popular newspaper has permeated the social network, the company has now started tagging some of The Onion's more outlandish articles with a "satire" label. This is in part due to--wait for it-- users thinking that the Onion stories are actually real news.
According to arstechnica.com, "if a friend posts an Onion link to his or her Facebook feed, click on it for a laugh. Once you're done at The Onion and come back to your desktop or laptop browser, Facebook will have generated three related articles in a box directly below whatever you'd clicked on. In the case of an Onion link, that box will usually contain at least one article from the same site, only that article's headline will begin with the word 'satire' in brackets. As of press time, we were able to duplicate this result on three different computers from different accounts."
It seems that the confusion between what is a real story and what is simply a "joke" story has taken its toll, confusing members as to just what is meant to make users laugh and what is actual news reporting. It can be inferred that the new satire tag for articles on the fence of whether they are real or satirical has become blurred, necessitating the Facebook brass to make the distinction.
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."
Hopefully, users will start to realize that the Onion's stories are in no way true and written for comedic purposes only.
