Facebook To Add Labels on Posts To Distinguish Satire and Real News

Facebook has added a new feature that will help people know if a post is satirical or factual and legitimate.

The social media giant has recently started testing a new feature in the US that will assign labels to pages to give people more context about the pages they visit. Some labels are Satire, Fan and Public Official. A tweet from Facebook Newsroom detailed that the company will gradually apply these labels to more posts soon.

A satire page is a page where a person or a group of people use humour and exaggeration to give social commentary. However, people have begun to be less and less critical of what they read online, and thus, pages like The Onion are taken seriously and considered as actual news by some people.

It seems that Facebook is hoping that adding these labels will help combat the spread of misinformation and fake news on its platform. However, the labels’ placement and size could undermine the company’s effort as the labels might not be big enough for people to notice them immediately.

Credit: Twitter

You may remember that other social media platforms have made an effort to inform their users whether a post is factual or not. The best example of this was when Twitter decided to fact check tweets from former US President Donald Trump before, during and after the 2020 US presidential elections prior to his ban on the platform.

Facebook has also taken steps to limit the spread of misinformation and fake news in the past; the company had previously launched the Facebook Journalism Project and the News Integrity Initiative. The company mentioned that these measures were expected to give people better information for them to make smart choices about what they read, as well as to help people make informed judgements about the media they consume and share online.

Instagram has also been collaborating with third-party fact-checkers in the US to help “identify, review and label false information” on its platform since May 2019. Whenever a post has been rated as false or partly false, Instagram will reduce its distribution by removing the post in question from Explore and hashtag pages, as well as reducing its visibility in Feed and Stories.

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Written by John Paul Joaquin