(Image courtesy niticentral.com)
In what seems to be a bug in Facebook’s new feature that marks fake news reports with the “Satire” tag, the popular social network has tagged a serious report by Times Of India journalist Sagarika Ghose as “Satire”. An outraged Sagarika Ghose took up the issue with Facebook’s Help Center and sent as many as four mails asking the social media giant to double check its algorithm, without much success. Her fifth mail warned of 10 questions on Twitter to Mark Zuckerberg, after which Facebook’s top management promptly assigned a team of top engineers to look into the matter.
“We have been going through the algorithm for the past few days, and are unable to find out what’s wrong with it,” confessed an engineer from Facebook. “We’ve tried debugging it. We’ve tested it with a variety of datasets. But it seems to be 100% accurate. It is able to correctly tag reports from satire portals such as The Onion, The Borowitz Report etc. or various mainstream news portals across the portal. The algorithm is so good that it is even able to recognize Times of India as a serious portal. But somehow it isn’t able to categorize Sagarika’s articles correctly.”
Reportedly, the issue was eventually escalated to Zuckerberg himself, who asked for a set of Sagarika’s latest articles to figure out the problem with the algorithm, and ended up guffawing all morning. “Hahahahahaha! I don’t know what people are complaining about, man. I went through these articles and the algorithm seems to be spot on.”
Finally Facebook’s engineers gave up trying to tweak the algorithm and simply put Ms. Sagarika Ghose in an exception list, which did what was desired, but didn’t quite stifle the flow of complaints. “Now there’s a section of people who’re complaining that her article is NOT marked as satire. We give up!” said an engineer, shaking his head.
Amidst these events, Sagarika Ghose’s husband Rajdeep Sardesai took to Facebook to express his dismay. “Watching moves of a senior social media network. Truly fear the industry has lost its moral compass. Wake up before its too late folks,” he wrote. The update was promptly marked as “Satire” by Facebook’s algorithm.