Facebook has always allowed users to edit the link to things that they share. By this I mean when you paste a link into a Facebook post to share an article or web page with your audience, you have been able to manually edit what the link and description says. This has been a helpful feature for people to tailor their posts in any given direction. Facebook recently announced that they are removing this feature completely in September 2017.
Facebook believes that removing the option to edit shared links will help decrease the spread of fake news. I can understand why being able to edit these links would be seen as a problem. Up until now, you have been able to make a web link say whatever you wanted. For publishers and social media managers, in particular, editing links has been an important way to customize how content appears on Facebook. This has also been a helpful feature to use for A/B testing different writings of the same thing.
Although they are removing the option to edit links, they are still looking out for ways to help these people. There is a new “Link Ownership” option, which will allow people with proven ownership of a link to edit as normal. Publishers and media specialists will have until September to claim link ownership before the feature shuts off. There is somewhat of a different process to get link ownership for different roles. Read here about how you can register with link ownership.
Facebook is doing all that it can to combat the spread of fake news. During the latest presidential election, research showed that two-thirds of the Americans on Facebook got at least some of their news from this platform. That is around 44% of the entire population. As Facebook grows, so does its responsibility. Removing the option to edit links could decrease the number of spammers and those who spread the fake news; however, this is not intended to eliminate the problem.
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