Continuing further with fighting back fake news and encourage useful content sharing, Facebook has taken another step. As revealed, Facebook will now alert users when sharing old content.
Facebook Notifies When Sharing Old Content
In a recent post, Facebook has announced an important feature update for users. As disclosed, Facebook will notify users whenever they try sharing links with old content.
According to John Hegeman, VP Feed and Stories, this feature will help people know the context when sharing content. Hence, they will get a notification whenever they share a link to an article over 90 days old.
To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days.
Nonetheless, it will be a harmless notification alert that will not hinder the sharing process. Thus, the users may continue to share the link. Or, they may tap on the ‘Go Back’ button if they feel an old article will not serve the purpose.
This alert will serve as a reminder to the user about the relevance of the content in the current context.
What’s To Follow?
Facebook expresses concern about the significance of content timelines with regards to users’ trust.
Our internal research found that the timeliness of an article is an important piece of context that helps people decide what to read, trust and share.
They also explained that the news publishers also expressed the same concern, particularly, about the spread of fake news.
News publishers in particular have expressed concerns about older stories being shared on social media as current news, which can misconstrue the state of current events.
In the future, Facebook plans to use similar notifications for other purposes as well. For instance, when people choose to share any article regarding COVID-19, such notification screens might redirect people to the COVID-19 Information Center for accessing authentic information.
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