Facebook now shows warnings before you share COVID-19 articles

So you might remember, there’s a little bit of a global pandemic going on at the moment. A few months ago, Stuff was writing about how social media platforms were doing their best to help stop the spread of false information regarding COVID-19 and trying to raise awareness of the problem to as wide an audience as possible. Yet, in typical fashion, it turns out that there are enough stupid people in the world that several months later Facebook is still trying to warn people about the coronavirus. While its taken steps to remove misinformation propagated by users on the platform, its going the extra mile and attempting to keep garbage off the site entirely with a new warning system.

This new notification system will now pop up when a Facebook users shares an article to the social media platform. The notification is designed to give readers more context in the shared article to help them “understand the recency and source of the content before they share it.” What’s neat about this update is that these notifications will only pop up for sites that aren’t official sources of information, so news sent out by “government health authorities and recognized global health organizations, like the World Health Organization” will not receive the notification.

“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,” reads Facebook’s blog post announcement.

It’s another decent step to limit the amount of nonsense your one brainless friend from high school keeps sharing onto their page. Yet the question still stands: Will a simple pop up really effect what people choose to share?

(Source: The Verge)