Facebook’s anti-fake news campaign has expanded to disabling link modifications in previews posted to pages.
The social media giant has embarked on efforts to limit the spread of false news and, last month, announced in a blog post that users would no longer be able to modify shared link previews on Facebook.
On Wednesday morning, Facebook product manager, Alex Hardiman, announced the latest steps in preventing the spread of false news on social media.
“Starting today non-publisher pages will no longer be able to overwrite link metadata (headlines, descriptions, images) in the graph API or in page composer,” Hardiman said. “This will help eliminate a channel that has been abused to post false news. Impacted pages can still program and preview how their link attachments will appear on Facebook using open graph tags and our sharing debugger.”
As explained by Engadget, creators of fake news have taken advantage of the ability to customize a story's metadata to spread misinformation, often replacing the headline, image and snippet with something controversial to generate shares, likes and comments. The capability to modify link previews has now been disabled by Facebook.
Additionally, Facebook also introduced adjustments that allow for publishers to credit link ownership while also continuing to edit how links appear on the site.
“Pages that abuse the ability to modify their own links in any way (for example, misrepresenting link content, spamming people with posts that do not meet our community standards) will lose access to this tool to overwrite metadata for link previews,” said Hardiman.
Facebook started a rigorous drive to tackle the spread of fake news ahead of U.S national elections last year and further strengthened it earlier this year ahead of June’s parliamentary election in Britain, noted Reuters.
It was reported that Facebook suspended 30,000 accounts in France over a month prior to the elections.
Last year Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook took misinformation seriously.
“Our goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful, and we know people want accurate information,” he said. “We've been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously.”
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