Here's a way Facebook is actually fighting fake news
UPDATE: July 19, 2017, 9:23 a.m. EDT Facebook updated its system Tuesday so that Pages cannot change how a link is presented, as Mashable previously reported. That means the headline, description, and image cannot change, which immediately caused concern by some Page owners who said they rely on these options to better package stories.
When it officially rolled out the feature, Facebook introduced a solution to help alleviate any pain from publishers who are not bad actors and want to change how the story appears.
"We're introducing a tab in Page Publishing Tools for publishers to indicate link ownership and continue editing how their own links appear on Facebook," Facebook's news product manager Alex Hardiman wrote in a blog. More changes could come in the next few months.
Original story:
Facebook is cutting down on misinformation— AKA fake news—shared on the world's largest social network.
A new tweak to its API (a fancy acronym for shared code) will prevent Facebook users from changing the headline, description, and image that is shared when posting a link, Facebook revealed in a post on its developers blog.
That means Facebook users can no longer post an article titled "Here's a way Facebook is actually fighting fake news" and change the headline to "Here's a way Twitter is not fighting real news" in order to try to get more clicks.
It's a clear effort to rule out bad actors, who change headlines to trick people and spread misinformation.
“Allowing modification of link headlines and images when sharing posts has provided a potential vehicle for malicious users to misrepresent underlying link content, and hence Facebook is removing the capability," a member of the Facebook marketing partner team told the Social News Desk. The company sent a similar statement to Mashable.
But it is an unfortunate change for many publishers who currently experiment with different headlines and images as a way to attract different audiences on Facebook. Not every publisher was changing the text or image with malicious intent.
With the conversation of fake news and Facebook admitting it needs to make changes, it appears that that time has come to an end.
As Social News Desk put it, "This is why we can't have nice things." Thanks, Mark.
Topics Facebook Social Media
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
