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Facebook Hopes Tiny Labels On Posts Will Stop Users Confusing Satire With Reality (theverge.com) 113

Posted by BeauHD from the context-is-key dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Facebook is adding additional labels to posts from Pages that appear in users' News Feeds in a bid to reduce confusion about their origin. These labels will include "public official," "fan page," and "satire page." The company says it's already started testing the deployment of these labels in the US, and will gradually add them to more posts. Facebook hasn't offered any explanation as to why it's adding these labels, but identifying satire seems particularly important. Take a look at the social shares for any news articles written by well-known satirical sites like The Onion or The Babylon Bee and you'll find plenty of people taking these stories at face value. In such a context these posts are essentially a type of misinformation, even if their creators did not intend this. Even high profile figures like former president Donald Trump have mistaken these stories for real reports.
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Facebook Hopes Tiny Labels On Posts Will Stop Users Confusing Satire With Reality More

Facebook Hopes Tiny Labels On Posts Will Stop Users Confusing Satire With Reality

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  • Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)

    by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:05AM (#61254656) Homepage
    I can't tell you how many times I've had people forward stories from the Babylon Bee asking me to be outraged.

    Yeah, some stories need to be clearly marked satire.

    (For some reason I've never seen The Onion stories forwarded as if they were real-- Onion seems better at making their stories funny enough that you can tell it's satire.

    • Re:Yeah (Score:5, Interesting)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:13AM (#61254690) Homepage
      ...and I completely forgot the part where Donald Trump tweeted a story from the Babylon Bee [nydailynews.com] thinking it's real.
      https://www.newsweek.com/trump... [newsweek.com]

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        That guy is just dumb. But explains how he could be voted into office nicely: Many people can clearly identify with that dumbness.

      • IKR?

        You'd have to be a complete fucking idiot to fall for obvious satire like that.

        Like when the NYT believed The Onion's satirical Tiger Beat cover of Barack Obama was real?
        No doubt they were distracted by the tingle up their leg at the thought.
        https://www.baltimoresun.com/e... [baltimoresun.com]

        or when Snopes fact-checked such a story?
        https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
        Hilariously, they refuse to admit their gullibility today - note it's identified "labeled" satire as if there's some question whether an article in the Babylon

        • The conspiracy-minded have suggested Snopes.com knew the "Babylon Bee" articles were satirical and deliberately fact-checked them in an attempt to influence Facebook's algorithms and keep the Bee articles from being shared.

        • I don't think you are accurately portraying the NYT example. They weren't fooled by an Onion article. They were doing an article on the past 40 years of Tiger Beat magazine. In that article, they showed a sample of pictures of covers from magazine over the years. In that series of pictures, they included a picture of the parody cover from The Onion. They didn't reference anything from the Onion piece in the text of the story. And it was a ridiculously short "article" on top of that...4 paragraphs. It wasn't

    • I wonder how long before semantic satiation will render those labels useless.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I wonder how long before semantic satiation will render those labels useless.

        Interesting effect. Did not know about this one. Thanks for bringing it up.

    • Poe's Law [pinimg.com]

    • Re:Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Forty Two Tenfold ( 1134125 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:51AM (#61254830)
      We have a saying here, "Who lives in Poland, doesn't laugh at the circus". Sometimes reality is so outrageous, you just don't know anymore – is this some insane dream? This is Polish president on the phone with the king of Jordan [wprost.pl].

    • can't tell you how many times I've had people forward stories from the Babylon Bee asking me to be outraged.

      I think Ron White said it best:

      "You can't fix STUPID"

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        No, but on the plus side, it is a resource that renews itself infinitely as long as there are humans around. (As we have a finite planet and no real way to get off it, the requirement for humans tends to limit its availability eventually.)

    • Re:Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rickb928 ( 945187 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @09:38AM (#61255054) Homepage Journal

      I make that mistake a couple of times a year.

      Otherwise, the Bee is plainly, to me, satire, 99% of the time. And notthebee isn't.

      The root problem is that what we used to think of as 'news', once titled 'journalism', has become mere propaganda. Almost all of it, and for many outlets it is 100% propaganda, only correct or accurate as often as a stopped clock is so.

      We've let this happen, somewhat, subscribing to popular thought without discernment And we've let the politicians dictate too much.

      • Re: Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)

        by CrappySnackPlane ( 7852536 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @10:20AM (#61255304)

        You say "we've let this happen" as if the Hearst empire of the 1900s or the Hippie Panic of the 1960s was somehow a golden age of Truth and Integrity in Journalism. It wasn't. People remember the Pentagon Papers and the Silent Springs and forget all the horseshit that padded the papers out to 100 pages. Just like zoomers will remember the Snowden Leaks and forget all the fluff when making up their own delusional memories of how bad journalism has "become" in 2050.

        Whatever failures exist have always existed, and you can't recapture what never was. Australia can't recapture Brazil. They can only CAPTURE it.

        • And what ever happened to Bay Boy [wikipedia.org]. Is he hiding in a CIA safehouse? Is the media trying to cancel him? It's all very suspicious.

    • hm, like "dont put plastic bag over head and strangle yourself" ?
      thats the level of facebook users ? ... it would make sense somehow

    • YMMV (Score:5, Informative)

      by Xenographic ( 557057 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @10:32AM (#61255376) Journal

      > For some reason I've never seen The Onion stories forwarded as if they were real

      Really? Because there's a huge subreddit dedicated to precisely that which regularly hits the front page:

      https://www.reddit.com/r/AteTheOnion/ [reddit.com]

    • You clearly need to associate with brighter people.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by XXongo ( 3986865 )

        You clearly need to associate with brighter people.

        I don't actually associate with Donald Trump.

        Turns out that for the last four years I got bombarded with his blatherings whether I wanted to associate with him or not.

    • "For some reason I've never seen The Onion stories forwarded as if they were real-"

      The Chinese communist party fell for them multiple times also some republican senators in the day.

  • Seriously? (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:07AM (#61254664)

    People are ignoring the most obvious red flags, inconsistencies, violations of basic scientific principles, etc. and a "tiny label" is supposed to fix that? I mean, Facebook obviously knows this will not work, but how utterly stupid are the people they are trying to convince they are doing something with that?

    • I am in my mid 40's. I never had taken a school class or my parents taught me how to catch "red flags, inconsistencies, violations of basic scientific principles, etc. " I had learned most of it myself, just by growing up with the internet and knowing how the software works. I grew up in an era where if it was on the 6:00 TV News, it had to be true, or if it was in one of the bigger papers than the content had to be true. Producing such content back then costed a lot of money, risking your brands reputa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        From observations by me and others (mostly, but not only from teaching), in any larger groups of human beings, you have about 10...15% independent thinkers. These are the people that can and will fact-check, notice red flags and generally have a reasonable understanding as to how things work and when somebody may attempt to con them. The fascinating thing is that high intelligence or significant education is not a real factor in this. These people just care to understand and have a reasonable estimation on

  • Hard to tell reality from satire these days (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ohieaux ( 2860669 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:07AM (#61254666)
    Given all the news from both sides, half of what you see on The Onion and The Babylon Bee could well be true.
    • Many of the BB articles do come true. I believe one of their slogans is "Today's Sarcasm becomes tomorrow's Headlines".

  • hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:09AM (#61254674) Journal
    It would help if reality today didn't look so much like satire.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. "Interesting times" and deeply funny as long as you like dark humor and have a high pain threshold.

  • For those that just can't handle reality.
  • Anyone else think that's adorable? 'Cause I think that's just adorable.

  • Having to explain what the difference is because people do not understand seems like autism to me.

  • Especially in 2021! As Mark Twain says... They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. So much clown world these days that people don't know when it's a joke! Just remember, it's all a joke these days! The jokes on you!

  • The Babylon Bee likes to periodically put out articles that suggest that reality is so fucked up that they've basically called X number of news stories when they published satire.

    This is part of the problem with modern woke politics. If you'd published an article in 2001 saying "progressive activists shout at homeless man about his privileged status as a white male" it would be taken as satire at face value.

    By 2021, there are real reports of woke Antifa/BLM-aligned activists literally telling a 70 year old

    • You used the word woke. Everyone drink.

    • If you'd published an article in 2001 saying that at some point Donald Fucking Trump, of all people, would become President of the United States, basically everyone and his dog would have immediatly known that it was satire.

      There's a reason old "yelling at clouds" farts like me are saying that people are getting dumber and dumber with each generation. It's because they are.

    • Do not make the mistake of believing TPTB are stupid or insane. They are deliberate, intentional, and sincere. This is about the P.

  • That would help you come up with better ideas

  • If you're too stupid to realize something is satire, then you deserve to be embarrassed in front of your family/friends/the public.

  • Onion predicts the future (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Angry Coward ( 6165972 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:43AM (#61254794)
    The onion does a great job of making their satire obvious and funny enough that it feels like a joke and not real news, and yet it still manages to frontrun real news far too often. My favorite of all time is https://www.theonion.com/fuck-... [theonion.com]. Now there are 7 pages of results for "5 blades razor" on amazon, and at least the entire first page is actual razors for sale with 5 blades. Its more than just a broken clock being right twice a day. The ridiculous has far too chance of becoming normal in just a few years.

  • Does the label say ... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kiaser Zohsay ( 20134 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:46AM (#61254808)

    ... "Whoosh"?

  • People are generally stupid, and don't read labels.

    They believe whatever was put into their heads as children, and don't bother to think to change.

    You may call it "cynicism." I call it "realism."

  • And how will they help people distinguish all the other nonsense posted to Facebook from reality?

  • they need one for (Score:3)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:57AM (#61254854)
    conspiracy nut post too, too many shitposts from lunatic conspiracy nuts get passed around as if it was factual, they need a tinfoil asshat icon put on them

  • Hilarious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @08:59AM (#61254860)
    We just ran a giant national experiment in lying, and it turns out, disproving stuff with facts doesn't actually work. Sometimes it is hard to determine the facts, but it's not really necessary to make stuff up from whole cloth. You can collect enough facts to support anything once people are primed to go along with extremes of selective facts, bad analogies, and blowing things out of proportion.

    In fact here is a whole book by Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) - "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter"
    https://www.amazon.com/Win-Big... [amazon.com]
    Adams has evidence on his side. He predicted Trump would beat Hillary, having identified him early on as a master of "weapons grade persuasion," which Adams admires. I hated this book and found it profoundly cynical, but I'm afraid it's mostly true.

    • Re:Hilarious (Score:4, Insightful)

      by burtosis ( 1124179 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @09:28AM (#61254994)
      Disproving stuff with facts has never, not in the history of humanity, worked on a substantial percentage of the population. These people never actually verify truth for themselves using introspection and critical thinking, instead they hand over the thought process to trusted parties and they swallow whatever they are fed. Who (trump, their pastor, etc) and how many people believe something is how they determine what is real, and this subservience of thought behavior is what makes these people’s claims of loving democracy and freedom so ironic and ludicrous when they are slaves of propaganda and are unable to make rational choices in their own self interests.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dargaud ( 518470 )
        Then it should be the propagandists who should be targeted. A pastor, an imam, a journalist, a teacher, a politician, a cop or other persons of authority caught lying: fine them. And if repeated too much, get them off their pulpit, fire them...
        • Sadly you’re making the same mistake I often make: failing to not apply logic. You see, they have attached their identity to these people and what they espouse is real to them. So attacking these people, proving them wrong with facts, or even shunning them makes them take it as a personal attack on them and they will become outraged. The outrage only makes them want to double, triple, dodechaduple down in a too big to fail scenerio. Worse yet, driving them away entirely by silencing their speech

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dargaud ( 518470 )
            I think an understated part of the problem is homeschooling. Parents are free to apply all their moronic beliefs on their kids without the kids having the release valve of meeting other kids or educators. Home education was basically illegal in my country (before covid!) and those echo chambers of abject moronism are much reduced compared to the US. But of course there may be many other factors.

            But to go back to the original point, I can give a simple example. If you have a network with a broadcast licens

            • Holding companies, and doubly so “news” companies, accountable to telling the truth has been overdue for a long time. This would come from the government and be enforced under the constitution whereas social media bans come from a handful of unelected private citizens who are not beholden to the constitution like the government is.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        Actually, it *does* sometimes work. It depends on the degree to which public experience prepares it emotionally for the facts.

        I'm old enough to remember the end Vietnam war. If you look at the opinion polls by year, the vast majority of Americans supported the war in 1965, but that approval steadily drained away, month by month, so that by 1973 2/3 of the American public thought going into Vietnam was a mistake. I believe that mirrored the spreading *personal* impact of the war on families and friends o

        • Actually, it *does* sometimes work. It depends on the degree to which public experience prepares it emotionally for the facts.

          Never was too strong a word, but the statement is still substantially correct.

          I'm old enough to remember the end Vietnam war. If you look at the opinion polls by year, the vast majority of Americans supported the war in 1965, but that approval steadily drained away, month by month, so that by 1973 2/3 of the American public thought going into Vietnam was a mistake. I believe that mirrored the spreading *personal* impact of the war on families and friends of men drafted to serve. By the time the Pentagon Papers were published in 1971 the public was ready to believe the whole thing was undertaken under false pretenses.

          This is exactly what you would expect, the news was brutal across the board. People trust the news, it brought down Nixon. It’s one of the sources people statistically latch onto when operating in that mindset. Public opinion was swayed on Nixon and Vietnam because of the limitations of information transfer only passing through a few sources that by today’s standards were relatively unbiased. Nowadays any crazy c

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )

      I hated this book and found it profoundly cynical ...

      And yet you admitted it was "mostly true" and even provided a link to it. Kudos. I'd say, sir, that you win the thread.

  • the "tiny label" is a link that explains what that fancy word satire means in very small words.

  • "Facebook hopes tiny labels on posts will enable them to avoid any blame for users confusing satire with reality."

  • satire vs reality (Score:3)

    by v1 ( 525388 ) on Friday April 09, 2021 @09:43AM (#61255094) Homepage Journal

    Stop Users Confusing Satire With Reality

    Don't we already have the "Fox News" logo for indicating satire instead of reality?

  • I am against this. I've had so much fun trolling my low information FB friends by posting Babylon Bee and Onion articles.
  • an internal monologue. That thing where you can think in your head and hear the words. It's a weird thing to think. I can't imagine not being able to "hear" words in my head but there it is. And as you might imagine they find it much harder to synthesize and digest information.

    I guess my point is yes, stuff like this is a good idea, even if it seems silly to you and me.

  • Take a look at the social shares for any news articles written by well-known satirical sites like The Onion or The Babylon Bee and you'll find plenty of people taking these stories at face value. In such a context these posts are essentially a type of misinformation, even if their creators did not intend this.

    Your projection does not equal reality.

  • Since FB has decided they are the source of censorship. Why not pull the accounts of people that "fall for stuff"?

    Dear former customer,

    You took a satirical post seriously and therefore have been banned for 1 year from Facebook. During that time we recommend that you educate yourself with regards to satire and the ability to identify "real" vs "not real". Facebook is a service that allows people to post both "real" and "fake" items. Understanding that will allow your return in 1 year to be a much m
  • and flagging truth and morality. Makes sense they would move right in to approved humor, tastes and art.

  • Why do you think it works with tiny stickers?

  • I know it's of no help and likely a source of harm, but isn't part of the hilarity situations in which a painful doofus confuses satire with reality? It will be even more rich when they ignore the tiny tag.

  • Making political points with satire is really really hard to pull off. No matter how obvious you try to make it, somebody will take it literally. [I am not going to share how I learned that :-)]

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