Facebook was designated during 2016 and earlier as the place where all kinds of fake news roam freely that, at that time, served to alter the normal development of the electoral campaigns for the US presidency and the Brexit referendum, thanks to countless news from the most unexpected corners of the planet, which they saw in their viralization through social networks a round business.
After those events, it seems that social networks have realized the enormous responsibility they have at the time of facilitating that any rumor or non-verified information reaches millions of people, and that is why they started a campaign to prevent circumstances such as those that occurred in 2016 from being repeated. And a few hours ago, Facebook has written the (pen) last chapter in this fight against disinformation and fake news.
Following in the wake of Twitter
It was in October of last year when Twitter launched a new function by which it asked the user that, before sharing certain news, read them to verify that this is exactly what you want to do. It goes without saying that we live in a world where many times we trust a headline to send a news that later, in the body, has nothing to do with it. Hence that advice to “read it first” before sharing.
Starting today, we’re testing a way to promote more informed sharing of news articles. If you go to share a news article link you haven’t opened, we’ll show a prompt encouraging you to open it and read it, before sharing it with others. pic.twitter.com/brlMnlg6Qg
— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) May 10, 2021
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And that is precisely what Facebook has begun to incorporate into its social network, the warning to users that before putting a news item into circulation that could be considered a fake news, Let’s read it and do the work of verifying that it comes from a trusted source and that conforms to what we expect, regardless of the headline. The idea that Mark Zuckerberg has worked with is to achieve an “informed exchange of news articles” among all users.
The important thing about this new filter, or notice to users, is that Facebook will be able to know if that article that we are going to share we have really read or simply, because the headline seems appropriate to us, we launch it without even knowing its content. In this way, and even if we end up doing what we wanted to share without reading, at least we will have a Jiminy Cricket whispering into our ear that we are not doing the right thing. Something that, let’s remember, only helps disinformation and fake news proliferate at ease.
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