Facebook Begins To Remind Users Not To Share Old News

Display Facebook notification when sharing old news (doc. Facebook)

JAKARTA - The Facebook social media platform is often a medium for spreading hoax news or false information. Although not completely hoax, sometimes many Facebook users often share old news links which are then peppered with wrong information.

To prevent this, Facebook added a new feature that will display a notification when users share old news content. This step is taken to prevent Facebook users from sharing content that is no longer relevant to current conditions.

"Over the past few months, our in-house research team has found that the timeliness of an article is the most important part of context helping users decide what to read, believe and share," Facebook Vice President John Hegeman said on the social media-owned blog. , Tuesday, June 30th.

Facebook admits that the spread of old news and articles is often shared by its users by adding the wrong context. Such cases are rife during political campaigns or elections.

In fact, this is not a new feature that Facebook has embedded in its platform. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg's social media has added a 'context' button which provides a glimpse of information about a news source in the News Feed, as summarized from Slash Gear.

Unfortunately this feature is not effective enough to ward off the spread of disinformation or hoax news shared by its users. Even though by tapping the context button, Facebook will display information related to the media, articles uploaded to the age of the news since it was first published.

By knowing the age of news and article content to be uploaded, it is hoped that Facebook users can be wiser when sharing information. Moreover, old news with inappropriate contexts will only cause disinformation.

"By providing more context, our goal is to make it easier for users to identify the content in a timely, reliable, and most valuable way to them," said a Facebook representative.