Why it matters: Most of united states of america take seen an article shared past a Facebook friend and wondered, "Did they even read this?". But the social network is testing a feature borrowed from Twitter that could aid in the boxing confronting misinformation by notifying users who endeavour to share articles they haven't even opened.

A per centum of Facebook's ii.6 billion monthly active users are guilty of sharing articles based on the headlines lone, often alongside an unrelated comment. The service hopes to dissuade this practise using a popular-up that states, "You are about to share an article without opening it."

Facebook tries to encourage people to actually check the information they are sharing by adding: "Sharing articles without reading them may hateful missing fundamental facts." Users aren't blocked from sharing the unread slice; the prompt offers the options of opening an article or continuing to share information technology.

Facebook describes the characteristic every bit "testing a way to promote more than informed sharing of news articles." Hopefully, the pop-upward volition make at to the lowest degree some users call back twice before hitting that share button.

The biggest surprise here is that Facebook never introduced this earlier. Rival social network Twitter beginning tested an identical prompt in July terminal year "To help promote informed discussion." It launched in full last September.

Social networks must tread a fine line when it comes to clamping down on fake news without being defendant of censorship, but this form of cocky-policing puts the onus on the user. Sadly, how much difference the prompt will make to Facebook's misinformation trouble will likely be negligible.

In other Facebook news, we recently heard that Facebook Messenger is now the tertiary of the company'due south properties to pass the v billion downloads milestone.

Epitome credit: Creative Lab