Over the years, misinformation has become more and more rampant on the social media platforms. Facebook, being one of the largest social media platforms the world over, has come under fire for the growing spread. Like many other social media platforms, Facebook has become one of the epicenters of a growing movement to battle misinformation.

In the past, the social media platform has introduced prompts and features to its platform across its apps and even on the web to help mitigate the spread of misinformation. In fact, Facebook is one of the only platforms which has a dedicated team and partnership to help verify the authenticity of articles shared across its platform. However, with the current, heated climate of the world amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and the large number of countries gearing up for elections, the platform is introducing new features to help curb misinformation even more.

The latest feature being added is a prompt that will notify the user if they are about to share content that is over 90 days old. The new prompt will appear when users click the share button on posts or articles older than 90 days old. The new prompt will help users rethink sharing articles which are outdated by giving them a second and more context to the article. However, users can still opt to share the article.

The new feature comes on the back of News publishers having increasing concerns of legitimate, outdated articles being shared as current news. This prompted Facebook to address the need for article timelines to be added to the contextual information that is available to their users.

In Malaysia, the new feature comes in light of an online tabloid being called out on its horrible practices of rehashing old, outdated stories and blatant plagiarism of content from other publishers. This issue also highlights a possible gap in Facebook’s measures that the platform should take note of. Sites that are rehashing and publishing old news as new articles may not be picked up by the new prompt as the publication date would be up to date.

We’ll have to wait and see if and when Facebook looks into that specific issue.