By <https://9to5mac.com/author/filipeesposito/> Filipe Espósito
Facebook continues to implement measures to prevent fake news and
misinformation on the web. The company is now testing a new method to ensure
that users will not share old articles that are no longer valid or contain
outdated information.
Currently Facebook already provides a context button for each link shared on
the social network, which reveals information about the source of that
content. The new strategy is more aggressive as it alerts users whenever
they try to share an article that was first published over 3 months ago.
According to
<https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/more-context-for-news-articles-and-other-
content/> John Hegeman, VP of Feed and Stories, the company has noticed that
some people are sharing old stories as if they were new, causing
misunderstandings to the facts.
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. 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prominently labeling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used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.
As pointed by
<https://gizmodo.com/facebook-will-finally-tell-your-aunt-that-article-is-fr
-1844178227> Gizmodo, Twitter is trying a similar approach by asking users
if they have read an article before they retweet it.
The new alert on Facebook is being rolled out to a small group of users and
is expected to be available to all users in the coming weeks. The company
also said its implementing more ways to prevent the spread of fake news
about COVID-19.
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