Facebook Will Now Alert You When Sharing Old News
The new feature will be available starting today.
Social media giant Facebook has been making headlines for the past few months, and now the company has just announced that it will be rolling out a new feature which alerts users when sharing content older than three months. Now, when trying to share a post, an alert reading “this article is over three months old,” will pop up, allowing you to continue or cancel your post.
Facebook has been criticized for not limiting radical political news, “fake news,” and other potentially harmful stories, and the introduction of the 90-day warning banner, the platform hopes to decrease the amount of untimely content shared by its users.
Vice-president of feed and stories at Facebook said in a statement, “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have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labeling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways.”
In addition to the new banner, Facebook is also in the process of developing other functions such as highlighting stories containing COVID-19-related content, and will feature a notification detailing the source of the link, and then transfer users to the Facebook COVID-19 Information Center for “authoritative health information.”
The 90-day news notification is rolling out across Facebook globally, starting today.
