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Comment by elxx | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how this is on Snopes at all. Facebook users (and even some news organizations) fall for The Onion articles all the time and report them as fact. Snopes debunks them - that's their job, that's what they have always done. Facebook failed to accommodate for satirical publications when they introduced their "fake news" flagging. This is entirely their fault.

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Nobody was being fooled by this headline. The only reason to “fact check” something like this is to punish the satire site.

And Snopes knew exactly what the consequences were on FB based on their “fact checking” work.

So a satire site making fun of how badly the mainstream news spins things got punished for “lying” because Snopes told Facebook they were lying.

If you read the original linked article, it is clear that they had to manually go in and select the articles that they believed were false and people shouldn’t be allowed to see anymore. They could have simply put up their article, without calling down FB’s wrath on the satire site, but they didn’t.

No, the reason for fact checking something is to check whether it is true. Whether it is intended as a joke is irrelevant to its truth.

Are you saying you've never, ever seen anyone mistake an Onion piece for real news? I see it all the time, usually from uneducated people, racists, and new-age moonbats.

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