I noticed subtle changes to my Facebook Feed this morning. One of the sites I follow on Facebook is Fake SportsCenter. I don't follow ESPN on my Facebook feed, but the Fake SportsCenter is consistently funny, not unlike the Onion, and usually has some nuggets of fact to make the post relevant. Well today, in the corner of the post, there's a tiny little i in the lower corner of the post. When you hover over the i, information about Fake SportsCenter comes up.
Apparently Fake SportsCenter is owned by a company called 12up and the post has mostly been shared on the East Coast. Because the site is called FAKE SPORTS CENTER, I never worried where I was getting my news. But it made me wonder about some other sites..... (including mine.)
What does Facebook say about CNN?
According to Wikipedia...we're going to stop right there. Facebook's reference points are Wikipedia and where the article is being shared? This makes me want to delete Facebook based on the principle that Mark Zuckerberg is no smarter than me. If I wrote a Beacon of Speech article and only used Wikipedia as my sourcing, holy cow, even the most computer illiterate of consumers would mock my site. Maybe Markie-Z is just a giant scam artist after all.
Let's try RT, just for fun:
Shocking....
Did you know RussiaToday is a <gasp>, Russian government funded News Agency?
Let's try the BBC:
Again with Wikipedia and the Maps. The map isn't with who's reading the article. It's with who's sharing the article.
Let's try local nemesis cleveland.com
For the record, there's nothing scandalous here. Cleveland.com is part of the media conglomerate Advance Local, which is owned by Advanced Digital, which is owned by Advance Publications. Basically a fleet of local papers.
So I shared an old article from Beacon of Speech and nothing happened. No little i popped up. Apparently I'm small potatoes.
I've also noticed that pictures don't have little i's. Cousin (Name Redacted), it was her 18th Birthday today. You get that news unfiltered, straight from Cousin X. I also noticed that Sponsored content doesn't have any more information, it just says Sponsored. Let's try a smaller respected news site, like Reason.com:
Nothing to post because there's no little i.
Well, I wonder what the cutoff is for a Wikipedia reference?
Huffington Post?
The Blaze?
Again, this is using the Filter of Facebook.
With the term FILTER being in the news today with the YouTube shooter, I'm sure we'll circle around to this topic in the the near future.