At the Guardian we’ve long had a culture of using data responsibly in the newsroom to find the widest, most relevant audience for our journalism. But attending to this data teaches us much more than just how to connect readers to articles. It also gives us crucial information about how different platforms behave and how individuals share our work.

For some time now we’ve been aware of certain issues around social sharing in particular. Shorn of context like the date, accurate and responsible reporting can mislead. As an example, almost every February we see a sudden spike in referral from Facebook to a six-year-old story about horsemeat in a supermarket’s meat products. Originally published in February 2013, it’s generally discovered via search, the reader notices the month of publication but not the year and kicks off an annual, minor viral moment.

In response to this, some years ago we decided to emphasise the age of older news articles by including a more prominent date stamp under the byline. But over the past year or so we’ve become aware that our original response hasn’t had the impact we wanted and that this kind of erroneous sharing continues, not least because it’s often the case that Facebook users are seeing only the post rather than the article itself. We’ve also seen the rise of some partisan Facebook pages sharing older content as if it were recently published to support their specific aims.

As a direct result of this, and in a drive to improve transparency and contextualise our journalism accurately even off platform, we’ve introduced two specific changes. Firstly, all older news articles on our site will signpost their age even more emphatically. We hope that even readers who are only briefly clicking through will immediately understand that the piece is from the archive rather than recent reporting.

Our new signposting shows the age of older articles Photograph: guardian.co.uk

This feels like a crucial and sensible step, but in the age of social sharing it’s also not quite enough. We’ve therefore built on earlier work responding to data showing that many people are unaware of the source of the journalism they read on social media. So now, along with adding our logo to trail pictures used by social and search platforms, we are also clearly featuring the year of publication on any article more than 12 months old.

The age of a publication will now be visible on social media before you click on it Photograph: guardian.co.uk

Trust is integral in responsible journalism and we take our responsibilities incredibly seriously. It’s not possible to control every action on every platform in the digital world but we believe these steps will make it increasingly difficult for bad actors to use our journalism to the wrong ends and will help everyday readers get clear context around our articles, regardless of when they were published.

As we’re relying on platforms re-setting their cached versions of older articles it may take a short while before some dates begin to appear.



