Facebook Is Testing Pop-Up Messages Telling People To Read a Link Before They Share It (techcrunch.com) 61
Following Twitter's lead, Facebook is trying out a new feature designed to encourage users to read a link before sharing it. TechCrunch reports: The test will reach 6% of Facebook's Android users globally in a gradual rollout that aims to encourage "informed sharing" of news stories on the platform. Users can still easily click through to share a given story, but the idea is that by adding friction to the experience, people might rethink their original impulses to share the kind of inflammatory content that currently dominates on the platform.
The strategy demonstrates Facebook's preference for a passive strategy of nudging people away from misinformation and toward its own verified resources on hot-button issues like COVID-19 and the 2020 election. While the jury is still out on how much of an impact this kind of gentle behavioral shaping can make on the misinformation epidemic, both Twitter and Facebook have also explored prompts that discourage users from posting abusive comments.
The strategy demonstrates Facebook's preference for a passive strategy of nudging people away from misinformation and toward its own verified resources on hot-button issues like COVID-19 and the 2020 election. While the jury is still out on how much of an impact this kind of gentle behavioral shaping can make on the misinformation epidemic, both Twitter and Facebook have also explored prompts that discourage users from posting abusive comments.
Read? (Score:2, Funny)
Who has time to read links before we share them?
Sharing my opinions and virtue-signaling are much more important than understanding what's being discussed - how else can we be certain that politics will consume half of any comment thread, no matter the topic?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Or this Simpsons clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Re: Read? (Score:1)
"your" opinions..?
Best joke ever.
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Not only that but I do not want to read all that vile stuff about Hilary Clinton eating baby faces every time I share a link. Far less read the words of that idiot Trump. No way am I going to be reading stuff before I share it "for the cause". /s
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hopefully we get a 50% mortality rate corona mutation that vaccines are still effective against. That would mop up the mess pretty quickly.
I'm sure Soros and Fauci are working on it right now.
Re: Who cares? (Score:2)
You just hold on tight to the notion that all anti-vaxers are republicans, but don't be surprised when it turns out the vast majority of people refusing the vaccine are blacks (Tuskegee), parents of autistic children (anti-gay ers before it was cool), and a healthy share of anti-trump democrats/independents.
And the k you for proving my earlier point that no matter the topic, /. Commenters will drag politics into it.
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You just hold on tight to the notion that all anti-vaxers are republicans...
Excellent point. The anti-science left is very much a thing that exists. The anti-science left loves naturopathy, homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, coffee up the keister, and any of a hundred other forms of alt-med fraud. And a cursory read any of my posts will reveal that I am very much a leftie*.
*At least by American standards. By rest-of-the-world standards, I am a mainstream social democrat, but Americans have been propagandised to the point that they equate anything to the left of sport-huntin
Re: Who cares? (Score:2)
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Coffee up the keister- Just looked that up, instant regret.
What has been seen cannot be unseen, as you just found out.
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While I'm not entirely in disagreement with your statement, believing a jpeg that has been copied enough times for it to be neigh impossible to read over accredited sources is the real problem. In other words, which sources people rely on.
FB as such isn't a source as much as it is an humanly fed aggregator, with fairly fucking stupid algorithms trying to make sense out of stupid peoples postings. I mean, what could possibly go right?
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Again the point needs to be made: if you are trusting Facebook for any information... I cannot help you.
Those of us of a certain age remember Blogger, MySpace, LiveJournal, GeoCities, Yahoo Answers, and hundreds of Usenet newsgroups and BBSs. Before that it was radio and TV hucksters promoting every kind of health and investment scam under the sun. And even in the social media age, many otherwise reputable websites are festooned with Taboola-esque ads ("Doctors Don't Want You to Know This Weight Loss Secret!"). Facebook merely lowered the barrier to entry for the propagandists to spew their bullshit and fo
It's a start... (Score:1)
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Or they could just disable "Share". No one uses it but my crazy aunt.
Metered paywall (Score:2)
Would the pain from the shock be greater than the pain in the wallet from having to pay for a monthly subscription after having used up one of your monthly ad-supported pages on a site with a metered paywall?
And just by coincidence (Score:3, Funny)
Next thing (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot will suggest that users read TFA before posting a comment.
It's the end times, I tell ya!
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Slashdot will suggest that users read TFA before posting a comment.
It's the end times, I tell ya!
I'd be happy if everyone just got through TFS ...
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Perhaps more people would if TFS was an actual summary and not a badly formatted copy of T entire FA.
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Perhaps more people would if TFS was an actual summary and not a badly formatted copy of T entire FA.
Thank you!
The "summary" in this article is 4 sentences plucked from the middle of the article. 3rd, 4th, 10th, and 11th sentence.
I guess they didn't want to repeat the whole article, because then we'd realize it's 13 sentences long, once you look past the page-sized ads.
And yet some sites want me to share before... (Score:2)
Man, this might help, might not. The number of site I hit that, despite blocking ads and such, seem to think that I want to receive alerts, subscribe to their emails, or share their stuff before I've so much as had a chance to read the first paragraph...
I'm sure that'll have a huge impact (Score:2)
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I believe this is a case of "Don't share _that_ misinformation. Share _this_ misinformation instead." Facebook is hardly an impartial arbiter of what is or is not true.
How about (Score:3)
Telling people that when they use a ''share'' link, they're also sharing significantly more than just the link. Who knows what they append to the URL for the result you want to share [your browser identifier, user identifier, origination identifier.. who knows what else.] But surely it's of no benefit to either user whatsoever.
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I've noticed that fbclid still confuses some webservers, particularly library catalogs. So nice to spend time tailoring a search strategy (list all the books with this keyword written between 1820 and 1867 in French, English and German) and have it all come to naught because of facebook's tracking scheme.
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You think someone using Facebook cares?
Goatse (Score:1)
Is there a way to share it on FB? That way, they don't have to read. They may not even open their eyes!
Nobody reads before posting (Score:5, Informative)
When I first joined facebook I used to point out to people that the article they posted didn't say what they said it did.
The answer always was, "oh, I didn't read it".
I soon realized two things:
(1) people just want to be the first to post something inflammatory and get the "likes". It doesn't matter what the truth is.
(2) facebook is a shitty environment
So I deleted Facebook. Everyone should.
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So I deleted Facebook. Everyone should.
So you shot the messenger? No that was a serious question. The number of times you see replies to a post with a link here on Slashdot pointing out that the article says exactly the opposite of what the poster thought it did is just as high as on Facebook. People are shitty. People are the problem. You point to this as a fundamental failing of Facebook but ignore the fact that Facebook neither created the links nor posted / shared them.
Better still, here on Slashdot we don't get to chose who reads our posts
Re:Nobody reads before posting (Score:4, Funny)
So I deleted Facebook.
I'm sorry, but it is still there.
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Some Android phone makers take bribes^W commissions to install particular apps. Deleting apps that came preinstalled on a phone requires root access. See if XDA or the like has instructions about how to root your model and delete the Facebook app from the system partition. Otherwise, make plans to buy a phone that doesn't bundle the Facebook app. This could be an iPhone or an Android phone with few customizations, such as Google Pixel.
On PC, you can block browsers from trying to connect to Facebook-related
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Re: Nobody reads before posting (Score:2)
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This is facebook you are talking about, so I don't know why you are talking about vague 'people'. They are YOUR FRIENDS. You picked them.
So instead of addressing your friends problematic and childish behaviour, you looked away, and let them continue. Really mature.
My facebook feed is full of interesting people (friends), having interesting conversations. I have no idea why you would want me to delete that.
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This is facebook you are talking about, so I don't know why you are talking about vague 'people'. They are YOUR FRIENDS. You picked them.
You don’t pick friends, you pick people to like the crap you post. They don’t really like your content, they just do that while waiting for you to like theirs. Sometimes people do confuse them with friends.
Here too! (Score:2)
Same for /. No one RTFAs. ;)
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In other news Slashdot is testing pop up messages telling people to RTFA before commenting.
LOL.
You read TFA, right? Nah me neither.
suicide (Score:2)
I think Facebook should be testing suicide.
"They want me to read it before posting?" (Score:4, Funny)
"Oh boy, if they insist:
Aitch. Tee. Tee. Pee. Ess. Colon. Slash. Slash..."
BREAKING NEWS (Score:2)
Porn sites to ask users if they are over 18 on their homepages to prevent kids from using them.
Better (Score:1)
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Yeah, especially when the editorializer bot clearly can't distinguish jokes, or anything else requires more than blind keyword matching. I don't doubt you would get COVID PSAs linked to a story about a Windows virus.
Lol, how stupid are they? (Score:2)
On one hand, their whole "business" relies on people mindlessly clicking "I agree" to ther nightmarish terms & conditions,
yet on the other hand they think this will do anything?
Okay, this is Facebook. Literal organized psychopaths. We can not expect any intention they present to us to be related at all to their actual goals.
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Twitter does the same thing already (Score:2)
Except they only do it SOMETIMES
Leaving the impression that they approve of some content more than other content...
Allow people to block all shared content (Score:2)
but this would be less engagement which would be less money for 'zuck
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Yeah, no, that's bullsh*t (Score:2)
So, once again, the Facebook is deciding what is and isn't "verified". Show us the algorithm. What, you don't believe the computer science?