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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

In 2018 Facebook "fact checked" a Babylon Bee article with this headline: “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication”. (Babylon Bee is a humor site and clearly labeled as such.)

https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008

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I hate Facebook probably more than anyone in this thread, but to be fair didn't they change their policy for satire sites? I believe they started adding a "satire" label (distinct from fact checking) explicitly to posts from satire sources.

That made me laugh. I don’t know anyone who would think that is a serious article.

A quick glance at: https://www.reddit.com/r/AteTheOnion may be enlightening/horrifying.

Laughing over these examples I had an epiphany: we need more of this, all the time.

If half the articles someone looked at were clear satire, people would have to think about what they are reading and who the source is. (Analogous to how we are being trained to recognize phishing)

For those that can’t figure out what satire is, A/B test content until we discover empirically how stupid something has to be before even they realize it is satire.

The people working in mainstream media - including the clowns at CNN - in the US are extraordinarily stupid on average.

A lot of media outlets ran with the (non-)story that Elon Musk was planning to quit his roles at SpaceX and Tesla to become an influencer. Musk was joking and very obviously so; and yet so many of them ran stories with tags like "it's not certain yet if he's serious." (CNBC for example promptly ran a story with that elaboration)

They're really, really, really, stupid.

In the US if you can't cut it doing anything else, you become a faux journalist. You write hack regurgitated tweet-based articles for Business Insider or MSNBC or CNN. Which also partially explains the condition of journalism in the US.

Counter argument: they knew what Musk meant but also knew the (admittedly dumb) angle that would generate the most clicks and chose to run with it.

I know plenty

Well, I used to think /pol/ was satire, but they managed to start a whole religion (QAnon).

“Something is wrong when the king needs to censor the jester”

Well... that seems to be working? The story isn't a fact. Got marked as not a fact. What's the problem?

When they are wasting time fact checking satire and also censoring facts from renowned medical journals, it points to some failure in the system occurring.

"Repeat offenders will see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertised removed." Is the problem, a satire post by a satirical publication has been notified their distribution and monetization could be penalized as a result of their satire, because a 'fact checker' decided to identify the content and treat it like a news piece.

Maybe they should mark the content more clearly as satire to avoid causing confusion?

Just to be clear what you're saying, you personally, or for the sake of others, need satire labels to identify that "CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication" is satire? That is the statement you just made?

Well evidently someone somewhere was confused in practice... as they fact-checked it. People mistake satire all the time on the internet. It must be the single least effective way to communicate humanity has ever invented.

Maybe these posts should have metadata? Mark things like sarcasm, hyperbole, etc. People already do that here - with the /s tag.

Exactly - the Onion was the original satire site on the internet of which _everyone_ should be aware and Reddit has an entire sub dedicated to people who ate the onion without realizing it.

70 million people voted for Trump. Yes, many people will read that headline and tell all their friends about how CNN is spinning the news. Have you not met many people?

Even knowing it's satire, the headline makes an implication that CNN is misleading people by "spinning" the news they report.

Anyone who thinks they (and all the rest) don't has Gell-Mann amnesia.

Babylon Bee is already clearly labeled. How much more clear do you want them to be? Only a true moron could possibly be confused by such a headline.

> Only a true moron

At Facebook's scale there are very many 'morons' out there who might see it.

And this article demonstrably confused at least one person... as it got fact checked didn't it?

Does that not say more about the fact checker than it does the Babylon Bee? It's clearly a satirical site. It takes all of seconds to recognize it if you look at the site.

Maybe? Not sure it matters either way? I think the conclusion in both ways is: satire confuses people and it'd be good to mark it.

The Babylon Bee is like the Onion and is at least as well known.

While I agree that there are people who take ridiculous stuff seriously, they're beyond what a fact checker--or anyone else--can help.

> they're beyond what a fact checker--or anyone else--can help

I'd disagree. I think a literal huge 'satire' flag on the post would help.

It'd help on your post, too, but ultimately we live in a world that contains vagueness. I feel more comfortable not marking a post about a giant washing machine being used to spin news with a blinking SATIRE sign than your post, though, because I can't take it seriously.

That said, they clearly label the site as satire on the 'about' page if there was somehow any doubt that articles about spinning news in a washing machine were not serious.

Have you seen the tweet? Facebook threatens consequences for "repeated offenders". So the point of fact-checking them is to accumulate enough checks to be able to kick in these consequences.

This comment has been marked as not fact, but opinion.

It'd be easier to identify Babylon Bee content as satire if they were actually funny

To be fair to them, their targets make their job so easy that they’ve stopped trying.

This title seemed clever enough after the San Francisco mayor's announcement yesterday: Study shows that defunding the police increases police funding.

It was never at the level of The Onion, but I think it was actually somewhat funny back when it was primarily about satirizing American culture from a Christian perspective (e.g. [1]). At some point it seemingly pivoted to just going viral among a conservative/Republican audience, humor and commentary be damned.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160325165926/http://babylonbee...

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