Facebook’s new update will help you understand the source of COVID-19 related content before you can share

We’ve reported in late June of Facebook’s attempt of letting you know when news articles you are about to share are more than 90 days old. Now, the company is adding more context to their warnings. Facebook are globally rolling out with a notification screen to give people added information about the COVID-19 related links before they are about to share them.

“We want to make sure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, especially when it comes to COVID-19 content. The notification will help people understand the recency and source of the content before they share it,” wrote John Hegeman, Facebook’s VP of Feed and Stories.

The notification screen will appear if you try to share a post of a COVID-19 related link on Facebook coming from an unreliable source. The notification screen will include a section that says it mentions COVID-19—with a link you can press to take you to their coronavirus information center. It will also have a warning that tells you where the article came from, when the website was registered, and when the article was first shared.

“We want to ensure we don’t slow the spread of information from credible health authorities, so content posted by government health authorities and recognised global health organisations, like the World Health Organisation, will not have this notification,” continued Hegeman.

This effort is one of the several features Facebook has added in order to slow down the sharing of inaccurate COVID-19 related news. The company took down a viral ‘news’ video about dangerous coronavirus conspiracy theories and treatments, but they were under fire for not taking it down fast enough.

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