One of the few remaining great joys you can experience in 2014 is that sometimes, just… just sometimes, someone comes along who doesn’t quite understand that The Onion is The Onion and it’s the best thing. The sheer glee gained from picturing someone actually trying to figure out how a 9,600 mile-long “endurance” roller coaster would work is so deliciously decadent that several lobby groups want it banned for consumption.
And because there are some people that need to be babied through the concept of what’s commonly known as “humour,” and being the fun police that they are, Facebook are now trialling a [Satire] tag, because we now live in an age where people need to be explicitly told that the headline “NASA Completes 52-Year Mission To Find, Kill God” will not lead to an article entrenched in fact.
The tag applies to Related Links that appear below an article that you’ve clicked on in your News Feed. I know that sounds confusing. Here’s a photo.
See?
Facebook is making the change because, get this, they received feedback that some people wanted a way to distinguish satirical articles from others. Because “[Satire] Gymnast Shawn Johnson Put To Sleep After Breaking Leg” is nice and clear. But “Gymnast Shawn Johnson Put To Sleep After Breaking Leg“? Totally confusing! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT TO HER, YOU BASTARDS. SHE’S A HUMAN BEING, NOT A HORSE. THIS IS AMERICA, DAMN IT.
For the time being the satire tag seems to apply to articles from The Onion only. But, in time, it will seemingly be applied to The Onion’s clickbait-spinoff Clickhole, along with most other notable sources of satire, proving once and for all that nothing can allowed to be fun unless it’s been explicitly spelled out and had all the fun sucked out of it first.
via Forbes.
