In order to further stem the spread of disinformation on the social network, Facebook has cracked down on businesses’ ability to alter the headlines and descriptions previewing links attached to their ads.
Facebook had announced back in April that it was going to bar people and Pages from changing organic posts’ link previews. This was described as a move to “eliminating a channel that has been abused to post false news”. Although Facebook worked to remove the option or organic posts, it still remained available to advertisers. This will be changing soon.
Last week, the company announced that it will no longer allow advertisers to change the preview text for links in ads. This happened after the Wall Street Journal documented how brands were using the option to make new articles that mention a brand appear to be more promotional in nature. But Facebook hasn’t currently enacted this change.
The advertisers using Ads Manager, Facebook’s self-serve a-buying tool, are still able to replace the default headline and description that correspond to links included in an ad, as of this writing. On Monday, a Facebook spokesman said that the company began to disable this option. They expect to eliminate its availability within the coming months.
Once the changes have taken effect, advertisers can still modify headlines and descriptions for links to their own sites through the Open Graph meta tags that Facebook uses to automatically populate the headlines, text and images in link previews.