Update on August 12, 2020 at 6:00AM PT:
Giving People More Context About COVID-19 Links
We want to make sure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, especially when it comes to COVID-19 content. So today, we’re starting to roll out a global notification screen to give people more context about COVID-19 related links when they are about to share them. The notification will help people understand the recency and source of the content before they share it. It will also direct people to our COVID-19 Information Center to ensure people have access to credible information about COVID-19 from global health authorities. Along those lines, we want to ensure we don’t slow the spread of information from credible health authorities, so content posted by government health authorities and recognized global health organizations, like the World Health Organization, will not have this notification.
Originally published on June 25, 2020 at 8:00AM PT:
When we ask people what kind of news they want to see on Facebook, they continually tell us they want information that is timely and credible. That’s why in 2018, we added the context button, which provides information about the sources of articles in News Feed. Today, we’re starting to globally roll out a notification screen that will let people know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old.
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.
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have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labeling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways.
Over the next few months, we will also test other uses of notification screens. 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. Through providing more context, our goal is to make it easier for people to identify content that’s timely, reliable and most valuable to them.