Facebook, the social media powerhouse with 1.79 billion monthly active users worldwide and where last counted 4.75 billion pieces of content was shared daily, commands a lot of influence in our lives and around the globe. What happens though when the information being given to us is changed behind the scenes without us knowing it?

Well it seems that may be exactly what’s happening. Many content providers rely on the sharing of their content on social media platforms and search engines in order to generate revenue. In order to offer content providers a way to control how users present their content, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter offered the option to provide information like the title, description and a picture to show users.

Facebook uses a system called Open Graph in order to give content providers a way to control how their media appears on the platform. The following DailyMail.co.uk article shows the Facebook Open Graph tags that they provided to show the users that share their content. Focus on line 54 which is where the content provider tells Facebook how to name the article.

However, whenever the article is shared on Facebook, the title doesn’t appear as it should. It can’t be a simple truncation issue because the word jet from the page’s source is replaced with war plane which the sentence as a whole doesn’t appear in the document. The description does get truncated with ellipsis, but words are not substituted in the text.

Comparing it to shared link from another media company, the article title doesn’t get truncated like the previous. The title remains unaltered compared to how it’s shown in the source and the description truncates the text with an ellipses, but again, no words are substituted.

There can be other reasons why this is happening though as well. The internet technology world relies heavily on caching content in order to speed up page loads so it could just simply be that Facebook has an old copy of the article stored somewhere and hasn’t refreshed it in a while. Whatever the case may be though, it shows that we can’t always take what we see on Facebook at face value. Messages can be changed without us knowing which can affect the way we perceive content that’s counter to how content providers intended.