Facebook Considering Feature Update To Prevent Spread Of Misinformation

Many of Facebook's 1.44 billion users turn to the social network for their news, but there's a little quirk with how it handles headlines. A feature has long existed on the social media platform that allows individuals to completely alter the text of an article's headline and sub-headline when posting it onto their profile or News Feed. A spokesperson for Facebook said that the feature was introduced in 2011 to allow individuals to fix fields that did not display correctly. At the time, Facebook didn't always produce the correct headlines, sub-headlines or images when a link was posted, so a user needed to be able to edit them.

But there's a pretty major downside. Because anyone can edit a headline, it's easy to misrepresent the news and a publication's intent. That means confusion or, worse, the spread of false information. Asked about the potential for headlines to be distorted, the company said that an update to this feature may be coming. "We’ve improved our automatic rendering technology so that most of the time, the link sharing preview does generate a title and description that accurately reflect what people want to share," a spokeswoman said. "As a result, we’re considering changing this feature to better align with how people share links today and to help ensure that publishers’ content is not misrepresented,” she said.