Facebook will alert you to articles over 3 months old

Looking at an article on Facebook and suddenly discovering that it was written a year ago? Facebook from now on will warn you if you want to share an article that is older than 3 months.

It has happened to everyone. You look at the activity of a friend or relative on Facebook and you see them sharing a seemingly up-to-date piece of news with a nice and shaky headline, and when you open the link you discover that it was written three years ago and contains outdated information.

For these cases from today Facebook is launching a feature warning users before sharing an article over 90 days old. When you click the notify button on an old article, you will see a notification. It is still not clear if it works by simply copying and pasting a link. Of course, many times the old news is still relevant, so Facebook will allow you to share the article, if you want, after of course clicking on the warning.

Facebook states that "the timeliness of an article is an important part that helps people decide what to read, trust and share, and that they are concerned about the old news that misinterprets current events."

Think about all the headlines you read and while you do not click on them, your perception of current events is probably influenced by what you see people sharing in their streams. Many readers do not sit down to read an article line by line but are content with the title, let alone the date.

The Facebook is considering other types of warning tags, such as providing additional content related to COVID-19 related articles, including the source history of the link and a link to the COVID-19 Information Center for more reliable health information.

Twitter recently implemented a feature that alerted users before sharing an unread article.