In its ongoing battle to curb misinformation, Facebook has announced that it’s testing a new feature that will warn users who try to share articles they haven’t actually read.
According to the official image released by the social media giant, a pop-up message will appear when a user tries to share an unread article, advising them that “You are about to share an article without opening it.”
The pop-up goes on to state that “Sharing articles without reading them may mean missing key facts,” before presenting the user with the options to open the article or continue sharing it anyway.
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. pic.twitter.com/brlMnlg6QgMay 10, 2021
Facebook tested a similar feature last year that would alert users if they tried to share an article that was over three months old.
Facebook’s new test is nearly identical to one that Twitter rolled out last year, which also asked users to consider actually reading a viral story before retweeting it.
It’s worth noting that while researching this article, we tried posting several unread articles to Facebook in an attempt to bring up the prompt, however, the articles were simply posted as normal, suggesting the new feature either hasn’t rolled out globally yet, or has only rolled out to select users.