Facebook Will Now Warn Users When Sharing News More Than 90 Days Old

News moves really fast and what could be relevant one hour ago could be irrelevant the next hour. For example if you were to learn that a company had filed for bankruptcy last month, but now this month they suddenly get a saved by an investment firm, what was news last month is no longer applicable this month.

As such, Facebook wants to make sure that users are aware that the news that they repost and share on its platform stays as relevant as possible, and have since announced that they will be introducing warnings where if the user tries to share a piece of news that is more than 90 days old, they will be alerted to that.

This doesn’t mean that Facebook will prevent users from sharing the article, but it hopes that by letting users know that the information they’re sharing could be out of date, it might give them more context. According to Facebook, “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.”

That being said, “old” news isn’t always irrelevant. For example, scientific discoveries or breakthroughs are still worth reading if they’re not necessarily new, or general topics that make people feel good or happy are also worth reading even if they might be old.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook