Facebook Testing Crossposting To Multiple Groups, But Is That A Good Idea?
Facebook has been taking a lot of heat lately for making it easy to disseminate false information quickly, so maybe testing this new feature is bad timing. While you’ve been able to crosspost to a group that you’re subscribed to either from your profile or fan page for a while now, the company is now testing the idea of crossposting to multiple groups at once.
Sure, that’s convenient, but not if it means an onslaught of slightly relevant or off-topic posts that you know will ensue as a result. Not only that, this move just encourages bad actors to be even bolder than they are now.
If you look at it from Facebook’s point of view, it gets people to share more content into more groups more often, which is a win. I’m not so sure the rest of us feels that way though.
The fact of the matter is that the company made this feature part of WhatsApp (which it owns), but after many complaints changed course. In January 2020 it put limits on forwarded posts to 5 times per message, and the results showed that the idea was very effective. According to WhatsApp:
“Since putting into place the new limit, globally, there has been a 70% reduction in the number of highly forwarded messages sent on WhatsApp. This change is helping keep WhatsApp a place for personal and private conversations.”
So it makes you wonder, if limiting the crossposting of a message was already proven to be effective, then why introduce it to an audience of 3.5 billion users, many of who excel in spreading misinformation?
There are already a few third-party apps available that facilitate posting to many groups at once (“Just like the pros do,” they claim) and they even say they’re Facebook-approved. Facebook hates when anyone leaves the platform for any reason though, so the crossposting idea probably came from the “Let’s do whatever is need to keep them on Facebook” ideology.
Once again, this is only being tested at the moment, so no word on whether it will be a permanent feature or even a feature at all.
