New Facebook feature to warn users before they share old articles
Social media giant Facebook is set to roll out a new feature that will warn users before they share an old post on the platform. The feature will alert users if news articles they are sharing are more than 90 days old.
Social media giant Facebook is set to roll out a new feature that will warn users before they share an old post on the platform. The feature will alert users if news articles they are sharing are more than 90 days old. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company said that the move is aimed at adding more context to stories shared on Facebook, the world’s most popular social media network with over 2 billion users.
“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,” Facebook said in a blog post.
“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.”
After this new feature, the users will get a notification with a warning before they share a news item that is more than 90 days old. The platform will still allow people to share that old article “if they decide an article is still relevant.”
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The platform is also testing other notification screens to reduce misinformation, including adding a notification for links mentioning COVID-19. The platform has been criticised in the past for its inability to stop the spread of misinformation.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently opted out of fact-checking the US President Donald Trump's social media posts, saying that social media networks should not be “arbiters of truth.” Twitter, on the other hand, has placed fact-check warnings on posts by politicians, including US president.
The social media giant recently announced that it will give users in the US the option to “turn off” all political advertising on the platform.
“The 2020 election is going to be unlike any other. It was already going to be a heated campaign, and that was before the pandemic — and before the killing of George Floyd and so many others forced us yet again to confront the painful reality of systemic racism in America,” Zuckerberg said in an op-ed published in the USA Today last month.
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