Facebook introduces a new feature worldwide that warns users when they want to share an article that is older than 90 days. The feature that was announced in a blog post, is intended to give people more context about articles before they share it, in the hope that the content of the platform will be "more timely and credible". Users can still share an article after the notification is displayed.
The feature was developed in response to concerns that old news articles can sometimes be shared as if they were current news, Facebook says. A news article about a terrorist attack from a few years ago can be shared as if it had happened recently, for example. Facebook says it can "misinterpret the state of current events".
Facebook is not the first company to have tried this approach. Last year, The guard has started adding the year of publication to the thumbnails of old articles when they are shared on social media. The feature "[makes] it much more difficult to spin an old story as a new outrage" The guardChris Moran, Head of Editorial Innovation, wrote at the time.
The Facebook feature is available as several social networks experiment with prompts to encourage users to change the way they post. For example, last year Instagram started warning users before posting "potentially offensive" subtitles to their posts. This month, Twitter announced that it was testing a feature to encourage users to read articles before tweeting again.
