But just because something doesn’t appear doesn’t mean that it’s gone forever with Facebook.

By clicking on the post information tab on the drop-down menu, one sees the option to view the edit history. Once you look at the edit history, you can see all the changes that were made to the post from the time it was first published.

The issue isn’t that users can edit their Facebook posts; that’s always been a feature. The issue lies in the fact that users can no longer see that a post has been edited with the immediacy of appearing on the post itself, leaving readers to go through a multi-step process that, frankly, most won’t be aligned to do.

Facebook says it’s old news

“In most cases, this type of editing isn’t a big deal, but the move to hide post edit labels takes away one of the few features that provided any transparency for our online behavior,” writes Brett Williams of Mashable. “This raises one of the biggest ethical questions that has long plagued social media and the way we interact on the internet: Should we have the power to instantly, surreptitiously rewrite our wrongs to preserve our online image?”

Facebook’s response to the change in the disappearance of the “Edited” label was to say that it is different, but that the change occurred a year ago, with the implementation taking this long to reach the majority of users.

Frankly, as busy as the Facebook homepage has become, it wouldn’t be altogether surprising if it had hit our accounts sooner, but we just didn’t notice until now.

Note from the Editor: We asked most of our staff when the last time they saw “edited” on a Facebook post and all said it was last week…

So as we consume social media, we must be more cognizant than ever before that things might not be what they appear. Fake news, edited posts, sponsored tweets without attribution that they’ve been leveraged and purchased; it’s hard to discern what’s authentic and original anymore. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take advantage of the tools at our disposal and try.

#Edited