Share friction: Out-of-date and COVID

Remember when you would get an email with “fw:fw:fw:fw” in the subject line, and you knew it was likely not-great content coming your way? Same thing happens on Facebook, but design patterns strip out most of that context. We call this a “deep reshare.” 

Beyond deep reshares, there are other signals we might offer that could give people pause: a news article that’s potentially out-of-date, from an original source that’s questionable, if it’s spreading suspiciously quickly. And who among us has shared an article without reading it first? 

So how might we convey that something you’re about to share might not be that great, but without judging the content or how it came your way? With a little light friction and carefully placed context. 

For this work, I took about 25 back-end signals and iterated like crazy to come up with potential user-facing language for each (that would fit in an existing interstitial pattern). With 40 options in hand, I worked with UXR to test with users in four markets to see how they performed. Once we weighed the good candidates against the technical constraints, we started with the most direct first: out-of-date content and a generic option with a COVID redirect

You don’t want to share a news article that’s no longer relevant, correct? But how about recipes? Celebrating old sports wins? Older, evergreen articles about current events that are immediately relevant again? Should we tell people why we’re showing up? The team worked to only trigger the interstitial on civic and news content, and excluded publishers who were likely to reshare their own evergreen content. Of course, we also found some good bugs along the way.

For this execution, we were looking to launch a somewhat generic bit of friction to give them information that existed elsewhere, and use it as something of a speed bump. Like turning over a cereal box to read the nutrition label to see if anything stood out to see if it was something you wanted to consume. We had an idea to adapt this direction to specifically react to information about COVID-19. So much information was flooding Facebook, and not all of it was reliable. With this work, we wanted to give an option to go to the COVID-19 hub, to find reliable information before potentially sharing. The content needed to be neutral and understandable, give an invitation to find out more, without being too coercive.