Facebook to give a warning message before users share COVID-19 articles – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Social networking giant Facebook is doing everything possible to prevent the spread of misinformation in the times of a pandemic. The company has now come up with a new feature that will warn users before they share any article related to COVID-19.
Facebook will now show a new notification screen, which will offer more context about the article or link a user is about to share along with its source. “The notification will help people understand the recency and source of the content before they share it. It will also direct people to our COVID-19 Information Center to ensure people have access to credible information about COVID-19 from global health authorities,” Facebook said in a blog post.
Facebook also adds that this global notification screen will not appear if someone wants to post information shared by credible health authorities like WHO or government health organisations.
The notification screen will appear when users will click the share button on articles that are older than 90 days. However, Facebook will still allow users to share the article if they still find it relevant.
Facebook also mentions that it also be testing other kinds of notification screens for the next few months. “For posts with links mentioning COVID-19, we are exploring using a similar notification screen that provides information about the source of the link and directs people to the COVID-19 Information Center for authoritative health information,” adds Facebook.
Recently, it was reported that Facebook has formally open-sourced one of its secret security tools for Instagram that finds and fixes bugs. The tool called Pysa is now available on open-source repository GitHub. Pysa is a security-focused tool built on top of Facebook’s type checker for Python called Pyre. The tool is used to look at code and analyse how data flows through it.