Facebook Testing Satire Tag to Help Users Distinguish Satirical Articles

Facebook is testing a new tag on limited users for satirical articles posted on News Feeds. For now, the 'satire' tag seems to be limited to articles from satirical news website The Onion, and users who read one of these articles via Facebook will see a satire tag when they return to the social network.

If a user clicks through to an article on The Onion and returns to their news feed, a related articles box will show three stories, of which the article from the same site will auto tagged with 'satire', Ars Technica reported on Friday.

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, one of which is shown above.

Facebook responded to reports about the new satire tag, telling 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."

Ars Technica adds that a Facebook spokesperson had said the 'satire' tag test has been going on for a month now, and that it was applicable to other satirical news websites as well, not just The Onion - though a list has not been provided by Facebook.

Written with inputs from IANS