Big Technology
Facebook and Twitter Are Rethinking Their Share Buttons
Both companies added friction to their sharing process in recent months
Starting this week, Facebook will slow you down a bit when you go to share Covid-19 related photos and memes. When you hit the share button on these images, the company will show you the date they originally appeared, forcing you to consider whether you still want to pass them along.
Facebook’s new safeguard, and others like it, didn’t get much attention at the Senate’s content moderation hearing this week. Big Technology, in fact, is first reporting this latest update here. But giving people more information before they share is becoming increasingly popular inside social media companies — Facebook even has a name for it — “Informative Sharing” — and the practice will likely influence information quality on social platforms more than any measure the current content moderation debate covers.
“If people share a piece of misleading content, irrelevant content, outdated content, they feel really embarrassed and regretful,” Facebook product manager Anita Joseph told Big Technology. “We knew there was an opportunity there to put notification screens in and help people not have that bad experience anymore.”
