Facebook: Modifying Link Previews
As part of our continuing efforts to stop the spread of misinformation and false news on our platform, earlier this year at F8 we announced an important change to our Graph API: Graph API version 2.9 includes a 90-day depreciation of the ability to edit previews attached to link posts.
By removing the ability to customize link metadata (i.e. headline, description, image) from all link sharing entry points on Facebook, we are eliminating a channel that has been abused to post false news. We also understand that many publishers have workflows that rely on overwriting link preview metadata to customize how their content appears to audiences on Facebook. We’re committed to a solution that supports them.
This may be great for consumers who don’t care what the link or the picture is, but for social media managers, this is a disaster. Currently, Facebook pulls from the meta data on websites that we’re curating from, and many small businesses, in particular, don’t even know what that is. A lot of companies that provide info and news don’t spend time changing their meta data and are we supposed to tell each website that they now need to change their meta tags, descriptions, and images so that their content will be shareable. Plus there are times I like the content but I will write a better title and don’t even get me started on how Facebook already chooses random images of the page that is not part of the article but are Ads on the page.
Steve Brown
Resource Group Media
