Facebook to notify users while sharing more than 90 days old content

Social networking giant Facebook is globally rolling out a notification screen that will let users know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old, a move aimed at empowering users make informed decisions about the content they share.

"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...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," Facebook said in a statement.

In 2018, Facebook had added a context button to provide information about the sources of articles in News Feed, it added.

"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," Facebook said.

The US-based company said that over the past several months, its 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have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labeling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways," it explained.

Facebook said it will also test other uses of notification screens over the next few months.

It added that for posts with links mentioning Covid-19, it is exploring using a similar notification screen that provides information about the source of the link and directs people to the Covid-19 Information Centre 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," it said.