Facebook tests satire tags, Twitter turns favourites into retweets and Reddit, Imgur and Twitch join forces

In the first facepalm story of the week, Mashable posted yesterday that Facebook is testing out a feature that marks fake news stories from sites such as The Onion with 'satire' in its newsfeed. Not only is this feature potentially going to be happening, it has actually been requested by some users of the site.

People are obviously fed up of seeing titles from The Onion along the lines of 'Onion Talks: Hypothetically It Would Be Okay To Have Sex With a Robot Dog' and believing that they are actually real. Seriously.

Facebook is running a test that shows the text '[Satire]' in front of links to satirical articles in the related articles section of the newsfeed, because people want a clearer way to distinguish between real news and satirical articles.

Ian Botham welcomes us to the week

You know how it is. You’re enjoying a cup of tea on a Monday morning, wondering what the week is going throw at you and the next moment you’re confronted with a picture of a penis. Classic Monday.

Cricket legend Sir Ian Botham was left red-faced yesterday after an alleged 'hacker' posted a very NSFW picture from Botham’s Twitter account. Cue lots of jokes about middle stumps and third legs.

Washington Post tests Amazon affiliate links

Not technically a social media story, but what the hell. It’s Tuesday, I’m young, I’m just going to go with it.

There have been rumours about what would happen to the Washington Post since Jeff Bezos bought it almost a year ago, however the internet went into overdrive at the weekend after an Amazon affiliate link was spotted in an article about a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory controversy.

Despite a spokeswoman admitting that the paper had been embedding buy-it-now style links for years, the Amazon link has since been removed with the explanation that it was a mistake.

Unsurprisingly, the appearance of the affiliate link got readers all heated, with many complaining about the paper not disclosing advertising.

Reddit, Imgur and Twitch join forces

A number of social networks, including Imgur, Reddit and Twitch, have joined together to form The Digital Ecologies Research Partnership, (actually known as Derp – for reals) which will offer up data to universities and academic researchers.

The partnership will grant unprecedented access to the data of several major social networks, including those above, and hopes to solve two main problems faced by researchers.

The first problem they currently face is the difficulty of getting data outside of the largest social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter), and the second is the problem of cross-platform analyses.

Twitter tests turning favourites into retweets

For some reason, the people at Twitter can’t realise that they’ve got a good thing going on, and won’t leave it alone. Its latest annoying experiment is to turn people’s favourites into retweets, which means it comes up in your timeline if someone you’re following favourites something.

Annoying huh? If only for the reason that a number of Twitter users seem to use favourites in the same way they like things on Facebook, so what comes up in your timeline could be anything from an article to read later to someone tweeting about what they had for breakfast.

It seems that Twitter users are getting quite annoyed with the unnecessary addition, with many complaining that Twitter is filling their timeline with stuff they didn’t ask for.

Tumblr wants to scan photos for brands

A recently published report from Mashable has revealed that Tumblr is on the verge of signing a deal with a company that scans photos posted on social media sites for brand-related data, so it can then pass that info on to anyone who wants to pay for it, who will then spam the crap out of you. Yay.

However, in the article, it claims that the data will be available to advertisers who want to get an idea of how their brand is perceived on that platform. Sure.

Iona St Joseph is head of social at 10 Yetis