NOTE: I am not on Facebook nor do check it out unless I absolutely have to, consequently, I am a "virgin" with respect to the thrills and excitement Facebook appears to provide to others, including those with reading comprehension problems.
Readers of Facebook who have reading comprehension problems and cannot tell the difference between real news and ironic exaggeration (as represented by "The Onion" stories) will now have assistance in making the distinction because of a new policy Facebook is implementing: Facebook will now put the tag "Satire" at the beginning of a news story to cue people that they should not take the news story as actual news (like the occasional Washington Post "journalist"). Apparently research done by Facebook showed that people had difficulty in distinguishing real news from satire even when the source was identified as "The Onion". But don't take my word for this, after all, I could be engaging in ironic exaggeration and how would one know? Anyways, here's a brief (Real) news article on the Facebook aid to readers who need assistance: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/18/facebook_experiments_with_satire_tag/ This article provides the following statement from Facebook: |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. Here's a blog post that goes into a little more detail and provides examples of where people confused an Onion parody with real news (like the Washington Post "journalist"). see: http://mashable.com/2014/08/17/facebook-satire-tag/ I have to thank the Mashable article for providing information about the "Literally Unbelievable" website which contains screenshots of people's responses (sometimes outrage) at Onion stories that were thought to be real news stories. If you are unfamiliar with this website, check it out here: http://literallyunbelievable.org/ After reading the above articles/websites all I have to say is, Boy! Am I glad I'm not on Facebook! ;-) <--- Satire tag -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=37974 or send a blank email to leave-37974-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
