To prevent misinformation from going viral, Facebook is testing out a function that’ll tell you to first read a news article before re-sharing it online.
“Starting today, we’re testing a way to promote more informed sharing of news articles,” the company said. “If you go to share a news article link you haven’t opened, we’ll show a prompt encouraging you to open it and read it, before sharing it with others.”
The social network posted a screenshot of the function, which shows the “read before you share” pop-up appearing on a user’s Facebook app. “Sharing articles without reading them may mean missing key facts,” the prompt goes on to say.
If the function sounds familiar, that’s because Twitter tested the exact same system last June. To promote healthy discussion on the platform, Twitter began asking users to first read an article they’ve yet to click on before re-tweeting the story to the public.
The “read before you retweet” pop-up was successful enough that Twitter in September decided to roll out the function to all users. During the test, the company found that people opened the articles 40% more often after seeing the prompt. The function also led to a 33% increase in people clicking on the article link before retweeting.
However, the read-before-you-share system from both Facebook and Twitter basically amounts to a pop-up—not a restriction. You can ignore the prompt and repost a news article, regardless if you read it or not.
Facebook didn’t say how widely it would be testing the prompt. But in recent months, the company has been working to reduce the amount of political content on the platform, citing input from the public.
“One of the top pieces of feedback that we are hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January. “So, one theme for this year is that we’re going to continue to focus on helping millions of more people participate in healthy communities.”