Facebook begins tagging fake-news sites as 'satire'

In a move that could permanently cripple the internet's unchecked hoax industry - and ruin at least a couple of decent punchlines - Facebook this week announced that it is experimenting with a tag that will mark sites such as the Onion, Clickhole and Empire News as satire and alert the millions of gullible people who share these sites as truth each week.

The tag was still a "small test", Facebook said, and is not very visible on the site. It appears only in Facebook's related-links box, which appears once you have clicked a shared link, gone off-site and then returned to Facebook.

Whenever that related-links box turns up a story from, say, the Onion, it will automatically mark that story with a "[Satire]" tag in the story's headline.

A test on Tuesday morning showed satire tags on articles from not only the Onion and its little brother, Clickhole, but also from Empire News, National Report, the News Nerd and the Daily Currant.

Those sites deal less in legitimate satire than in viral hoaxes, intended to deceive. In the past week, they have propagated fake stories like the imminent eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano and the brutal killing of an infant by a New York City police officer.

And as fake-news sites proliferate, it has become more difficult for users to weed them out. A top post on Empire News will frequently boast more than a quarter of a million Facebook shares, far more than on any other social platform. As that information spreads and mutates, it gradually takes on the pall of truth.

In March, a group of researchers at Northeastern University dug into how conspiracy theories proliferate on Facebook, ultimately finding - to quote MIT's Technology Review - that misinformation becomes entrenched when "ordinary satirical commentary or obviously false content somehow jumps the credulity barrier".