Facebook and other social media platforms have been struggling with misinformation around the pandemic. Facebook’s latest effort to help combat this is a pop-up warning before users share a COVID-related article.

Facebook's notification screen for Covid-19 articles.

This new notification screen is rolling out to Facebook users globally. Facebook wants to give users more context about the COVID-related article they plan to share on the platform. It also says that the new notification screen “will help people understand the recency and source of the content before they share it”. This pop-up notification will appear for all Covid-19 content except those from government health authorities and global health organizations such as the World Health Organization.

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 organizations. 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.

As for any other articles about Covid-19, users will get a pop-up screen that highlights key details about the post. The top box will clearly state that this article talks about Covid-19 and show a link to Facebook’s Covid-19 information hub. The notification screen will also show the original source of the article, and when it was first shared on 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 analyze how data flows through it.

Facebook continues to struggle with stopping the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on its platform. It’s already seen conspiracy videos on 5G and coronavirus, and the viral ‘Pandemic’ video grab millions of views and remain on Facebook for longer than expected.

Mean-while, The Covid-19 tally in India rose to 2,396,637 on Thursday after nearly 67,000 fresh cases were registered with a span of 24 hours. The death toll also increased from 46,091 to 47,033 during the same period, according to the latest data released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.