Facebook continues its fight against fake news with a new notification warning you when you are about to share old news.
The new feature will warn you when sharing an article that is over 3 months old.
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Facebook continues to add new features to its arsenal to fight fake news and misinformation on its platform. The latest feature aims to provide context on content shared with a new notification screen that will alert you when you are about to share a link to an article that is over 3 months old.
The new feature will not stop you from sharing, it will only warn you of its possible irrelevance. The decision to share will always be yours.
VO of News Feed and Stories John Hegeman said in a Newsroom post, “Over the past several months, 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. 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. Some news publishers have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labeling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways.”
Hegeman added that the social network will test other uses for notification screens over the next few months, including one for posts with links related to Covid-19 that provides information about the source of the link and directs people to Facebook’s Coronavirus (Covid-19) Information Center.
Of course, fake news will always be fake news. Now or three months later.