Whether it’s
politicizing the medium or being reckless with the sharing of inaccurate
information, Facebook has always been in the news for all the wrong reasons. But it
seems like things are about to change for this social media platform.

Facebook will roll out
a new feature that will warn its users if they share an article that’s over 90
days old. This step will essentially give context to the readers and help them
stay up-to-date with the modern and latest information. The platform wants to
provide information that is not only timely but also credible. Hence, whenever
a user is about to share an article, they will get a notification regarding its
date of publication.

An old article about a
terrorist attack can easily be shared today and people would buy the news.
Facebook feels that this act “misconstrues
the state of current events.”

Facebook is following
The Guardian by adding the publication date as a reminder to the user sharing
the article. The Guardian added the year of publication to the thumbnails of
old articles as it “[makes] it much
harder to spin an old story as a new outrage.”

Last year, Instagram
added a feature that was responsible in many ways. For example, it started
warning users before they put up “potentially
offensive” captions on their posts. And earlier this month, Twitter joined
the bandwagon by announcing that it would be testing a feature that would
encourage users to first read the articles before retweeting them.

It’s actually quite
satisfying to see that social media platforms – that are notorious for allowing
the circulation of unverified information, take accountability and ensure the
spreading of correct information.