Facebook should show publication date in articles preview to prevent clickbait
Sharing an article is powerful. We should know when the articles have been published at a glance to understand what we are sharing.
Understand if a content is true is one of the hardest things on the internet. Since everyone can publish and content stays online forever is hard to tell if what you are reading is The Onion or a legit source.
Social media should build everything they can to let their users understand what they are reading, commenting and sharing. We already saw dangerous behaviours in social medias. Building antibody against spread of false news should be a priority.
Why I'm concerned about this?
Recently I shared this article from the New York Times on Donald Trump and his visionary ideas:
And I got a lot of reactions from my friends, commenting the article, worried about the crazy declarations of Trump.
I read the article before publishing, and the date said “November” and a number, which I didn’t notice.
Then a friend of mine noticed that the article is from one year ago.
This doesn’t change the seriousness of the declarations, but my vision was completely biased. I thought that Trump was saying this at the very beginning of his presidential mandate. This is a completely different moment compared to his campaign. Everyone knows that during the campaigns candidates tend to tell different stories from what they will do during the mandate.
Discerning the truth at a glance was hard, and I’m sure that I influenced the feelings of other people as well. This has big implications.
A possible solution
I think that the picture below is a reasonable mockup of a solution for the date issue. I suggest to use the space occupied by the preview of the article to display the publishing date.
What do you think? Have you ever had the same issue? Do you think that Facebook should provide this information? Let me know it in the comments.
If you think that this should be included in Facebook share the article or press the green heart 💚
