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Facebook no longer clearly labels edited posts

Facebook no longer clearly labels edited posts

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You’ll need to dig deeper to check for changes

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As writers, we all hate typos. When you make one on Facebook, you’re thankfully able to correct it no matter how long ago the post was shared. A recent update, however, will no longer clearly label if a post has been edited.

As reported by Mashable, previously, when a Facebook post has been updated from the original, you’ll see an “Edited” label next to the timestamp. Now, when users edit a post, it looks as though the post was originally written that way.

In order to check whether a post has changed, you need to click the drop-down menu on the top right corner of post and see if “View edit history” is available. Here’s an example of something I shared yesterday:

This post isn’t exactly what I wrote when I first published it! But you wouldn’t know that unless you navigate over to the drop down menu.

Clicking this brings up the full edit history. You also get a few more details about what exactly has changed, such an addition or removal of links.

Okay, so I only added a period for the sake of illustrating this change, but you see the point. On one hand, you’ll no longer feel the shame of the “Edited” label when you make an embarrassing typo and your fumble is there for everyone to peruse. On the other, this makes it a lot less transparent when something has been edited, because I bet your first inclination when looking at a widely shared Facebook post is not to check whether it had been edited. Note that this change does not appear to affect edited comments on a post.

We’ve all seen how viral Facebook posts can influence a nation, and not clearly labeling when something has changed could have a profound impact to how things are shared on the social network. Brands, government officials, and celebrities all use Facebook. Perhaps on a personal level, this won’t make a difference to you — but the ability to sneak around rewriting the past seems like an odd change given our current plight against misinformation.

Whatever you think of the shift, it’s still tons better than Reddit’s policy which allows you to edit a comment but does not make clear what about it has changed. Twitter still doesn’t offer an edit feature, though CEO Jack Dorsey did seem to be on board with eventually adding one.