One of the widely used social media sites is Facebook and it attracts users from all nooks and cranny of the globe. With its increasing craze, the social media company is often seen to be coming up with quintessential updates and features to add to its existing seamlessness and attractive functionality. A similar feature has recently been reported to take its step into the Facebook community.
A pop notification will now be shown every time you decide to post an article on the Facebook account site. This step has been taken as a measure to reduce the growing wave of spreading false information and fraud content online.
These days, as it can be seen, people rely a lot on social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and most loved among all is- WhatsApp. With its surging popularity, people also tend to come across messages and posts that divulge information based on no concrete evidence and are often misleading. But, the increased access and the wave of company legitimacy among people often push them into the pits of scams and frauds. To avoid such issues, Facebook has therefore come up with an innovative yet productive measure to reduce the spread of such illegitimate information online.
Facebook will now come up with a pop-up notification that will ask its users to re-confirm their posting of an article online, and also of its surety. Although, Facebook users can still post the article without reading it if they want to but it is always better to proofread what you are about to share. A similar feature has been added to the social media platform of Twitter, which currently is under testing.
“Starting today, we’re testing a way to promote more informed sharing of news articles. If you go to share a news article link you haven’t opened, we’ll show a prompt encouraging you to open it and read it, before sharing it with others,” Facebook said in a tweet late on Monday.
Facebook also spoke about yet another change that is supposed to be brought about in the app sometime soon. Regarding which it said, “We are also limiting the distribution of Live videos that may relate to the election on Facebook.”
But, why did Facebook, a company so huge, had to take a step to curb the ongoing trend of spreading false information online? It’s because some people chose to not stick to the path of truth and rather went on to spread misleading information.
A piece of false information can create havoc to such unknown intensities which one cannot imagine. We have come across news reports which talk about how a riot-like situation arose due to a spread of false rumors regarding a person or thing. Recent ones to recall can be the Bengal elections havoc, the famous Adidas shoe scam, and false donation campaigns amid COVID-19.
Therefore, it is best advised to only share information which has concrete grounds of existence and proofs to substantiate its legitimacy.
