Facebook To Ruin Our Good Time With 'Satire' Disclaimer; The Onion Responds With Satire

from the peeling-away-the-layers dept

Satire: some people just don't get it. More specifically, some folks out there don't have the capacity to read what is an obviously satirical news piece and/or headline and recognize it as such. You all know what I'm talking about: you jump on Facebook and see an article shared by a "friend" that contains the headline, "Barack Obama Admits To Being A Muslim Terrorist Puppy-Puncher" and the accompanying "I told you so!" commentary from your friend sends you into a snigger as you see that it's a link to The Onion, Clickhole, or Infowars. You know, sites that are clearly filled with joke articles that nobody in their right minds would believe. This is one of the great joys of Facebook and social media in general: watching your friends fall for bullshit. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's what Facebook is for.



But Facebook doesn't agree, apparently, as the site is now experimenting with tagging links from these kinds of sites with a "satire" notification.

We can only assume this was implemented as a reaction to users believing that Onion links are nonfiction reports (you can lose hours flipping through Literally Unbelievable, a site that catalogs such boneheaded moments), but we're not sure what compelled Facebook to go so far as to assert editorial control. What's more confusing is this limited implementation, which itself takes a while to explain. Original posts on friends' feeds and The Onion's official Facebook page don't come with a tag. If users save the article to a read-later list, the tag will vanish as well. And other satiric sites, particularly The Onion's newest sibling site, Buzzfeed-spoof Clickhole, are immune to the tag.

DOYLESTOWN, PA—Describing him as frequently frustrated and overwhelmed, sources confirmed Monday that local Facebook user Michael Huffman is incredibly stupid. “I need stuff easy,” said the absolute dipshit, adding that he finds many things confusing, and that those things must be changed so that they make sense to him. “I like looking at things on Facebook, but I don’t understand a lot. Help, please.” At press time, someone had reportedly fixed everything for the goddamn imbecile.

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Forget confusing, this is yet another inch down the slippery slope in the war on humor and me-getting-to-make-fun-of-people, and I won't stand for it, damn it. People I haven't seen since high school getting fooled byhas been one of the great pleasures in my life and it's just not right for Facebook to chip away at that fun just because it appears to have finally acknowledged that its users are, by and large, idiots.For what it's worth,itself appears to concur with this assessment in an article reacting to Facebook's move Funny, but here's an idea. Instead of ruining everyone's righteous good time by tagging satire articles for people, how about instead we work on some kind of integration between Facebook and Snopes? That would be twice as useful and none of the nonsense I regularly combat with Snopes on Facebook makes me laugh, so no harm no foul. Guys? Yes?

Filed Under: algorithms, fooling people, satire

Companies: facebook, the onion