Facebook to warn you before you share news links that are old

Recently we saw Twitter introducing a feature wherein it will show you an alert in the form of a card at the bottom of the screen if you retweet the article without opening it. Now, a similar move is being made by Facebook as well. The social media firm has announced a notification screen that will warn users if the content that they are about to share is older than 90 days. They will also be given the option to click and share the article anyway.

“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, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant,” says John Hegeman, VP Feed and Stories at Facebook.

The post also explains that Facebook found that the timeliness of an article is an important piece of context that helps people decide what to read, trust and share. Also, several news publishers also expressed their concern on the spreading of an old article, just to fuel tha unrest in the community. So this solution is likely to end all that.

This has started rolling out globally and will be coming to Android and iOS platforms.

Facebook adds that it plans to improve these alerts in future for links mentioning Covid 19. “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 Center for authoritative health information,” adds the post.