Facebook starts 'read before sharing' trial for Android users

Do you have a habit of sharing articles you see on Facebook without reading them beyond the headline? Facebook's latest beta feature is about to change that.

Today, Facebook is rolling out a News Feed feature that prompts users if they are about to share articles without reading them in full. At least, that's the intended practice with the new pop-up. If a user shares an article they saw without clicking on the news article link, it'll trigger the notification.

According to Facebook, the new feature promotes "more informed sharing" of news articles. However, we're not sure if it actually helps, since the feature doesn't actually check if you've read the article carefully before sharing.

Facebook told The Verge that this trial feature would roll out to six per cent of Android OS users worldwide in its initial testing stages.

Ironically, this beta feature was announced on Facebook's Twitter account. Twitter, on the other hand, rolled out a similar feature back in September 2020.

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.