Now Facebook warns you if you share a too old covid-19-themed news

The new notification includes details on the publication date of the article: in particular, the time of the first sharing is displayed, so that you can realize how current or dated the content is

Facebook notification that warns if news is current or obsolete (image: Facebook) Facebook's war on pandemic fake news continues. Manlo Park's social network now also displays a pop-up alert whenever a user shares a covid-19-themed content. The new notification first sends subscribers to visit its coronavirus information center which, since the first moments of crisis, has helped with reliable news from local and global sources. Then, it includes details on the publication date of the article so as to contextualize it at a temporal level: in particular, the moment of the first sharing is displayed, so that you can realize how current or dated the content is.

Pop-up notification that alerts users when sharing covid-19 themed content (image: Facebook) These alerts leverage the technology employed for recency notifications, launched in June to help reduce the spread of old articles that , as observed by Facebook, they cyclically reappear providing a wrong picture of what is really happening in the world. "The goal is to help people understand the topicality and origin of the content before they share it", is explained in the official blog.

The platform, however, does not want to slow down the dissemination of credible information coming from the health authorities , “then the content published from the government and from recognized organizations, such as the World Health Organization, will not have such a notification ”. Despite ongoing efforts to limit the misinformation, Facebook has had to remove over seven million post theme coronavirus , because disinformanti, and had to add the labels of fact-checking to other 98 million .