Facebook innovates to stem fake news scourge; sends warning alerts
TO CUT DOWN ON MISINFORMA TION Facebook has said it will notify users when they are about to share a news article that is more than 90days old.
The change, according to the company, is designed to nudge people away from circulating information that may no longer be accurate, explaining that the notifications will appear whenever users click “share” under an article in Facebook News Feed.
“When we ask people what kind of news they want to see on Facebook, they continually tell us they want information that is timely and credible,” the social network wrote recently on its website.
Facebook’s News Feed actually does not show you when a news article was originally published but rather tells the date and time a user shared the article on the social network, even if the news story itself was written months or years ago.
Consequently, people usually end up sharing stale articles that go viral without realizing the information is outdated and thus misleading more users.
“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 labelling older articles to prevent out-dated news from being used in misleading ways,” Facebook said.
As the new notifications rolled out globally Friday, the rationale for its 90-day threshold was not explained but the company is also considering applying the approach for other use cases, including the pandemic.
“For posts with links mentioning COVID-19, we are exploring using a similar notification screen that provides information about the source of the link and directs people to the COVID-19 Information Centre for authoritative health information,” the company said.
In April, Facebook said it would show messages in the News Feed to people who like, react to, or comment on harmful misinformation about COVID-19 that Facebook has since removed.
“To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the new notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant.
“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,” the company said.