The functionality is expected to roll out worldwide in the coming weeks.
Facebook wants to avoid seeing the proliferation of old information likely to pollute public debate. The site will alert Internet users sharing obsolete articles. One more step in the delicate exercise of moderation of content. To remind its users to pay attention to the date of a publication, Facebook announced last week that the platform would display a message when someone tries to share an article older than 90 days, or about three months. .
Concretely, if you click on the “share” button under an old article found on Facebook, an alert message will appear in the form of a notification, indicating “This article dates from more than X months / years”. You will then have the choice to “go back”, and therefore not to share the article, or to continue, and to share it knowingly. The functionality is expected to roll out worldwide in the coming weeks.
This novelty is part of a broader approach on the part of Facebook to limit the spread of false information on its social network and educate users about fact-checking. “In the past few months, our internal research has shown that the timing of an article is an important contextual element that helps people decide what to read, believe and share,” wrote the blog. company John Hegeman, vice-president of Newsfeed and Facebook Stories, cited by the site “Busninessinsider.fr”.
The media have in fact been warning for years about the dangers of article sharing: “Press publishers, in particular, have expressed concern that older articles are shared on social networks as new information, which which can give a false idea of current events, “recalls John Hegeman.
In addition, Facebook has also announced that it is working on a notification tool for publications on the coronavirus: “for publications whose links mention Covid-19, we are studying the possibility of using a similar notification alert which provides information on the source of the link and directs people to the COVID-19 information center for authoritative health information. ” Facebook’s coronavirus information center brings together articles from trusted sources and messages from health officials.
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