In a move to prevent stories being taken for the real thing, social media giant facebook is to tag stories from satirical sites like The Onion as satire.

In the past these stories have given much confusion with people sharing them adding to the degree of validity.

A facebook spokesman said “We are running a small test which shows the text ‘[Satire]’ in front of links to satirical articles in the related articles unit in News Feed.”

It is not clear if this trial will be rolled out permanently and the scope of sites to be covered is yet to be established.

Our tip, if it looks strange search for it on www.snopes.com first!