Facebook has announced it is to start marking articles shared from the Daily Mail a ‘not satire, honest’ tag after a number of users complained they often thought the stories and views of the paper were some sort of joke.
“I thought their hatred of people that don’t look like them was some kind of running joke,” one user commented after sharing a comment piece on immigration. “I didn’t think highly trained news people could actually think like that.”
It was not only them who were fooled by the paper’s website. Many younger readers considered the ‘sidebar of shame’ to be a satirical look at the easy access of pornographic material on the Internet.
“I had no idea that it was intended as genuine titillation for the average Daily Mail reader.”
However, not everyone who considered the Daily Mail to be satirical was so willing to believe a ‘not satire, honest’ tag on stories from their website.
One skeptical reader told us: “I’ll believe that they really hate everyone, and I’ll believe that Coleen Rooney’s latest bikini is supposed to be genuine news, and I’ll even believe that their stories are written by journalist and not dark, twisted comedians.
“But I refuse to accept that Richard Littlejohn is not a made up character.”
