Modifying Link Previews

As part of our continuing efforts to stop the spread of misinformation and false news on our platform, earlier this year at F8 we announced an important change to our Graph API: Graph API version 2.9 includes a 90 day deprecation of the ability to edit previews attached to link posts. We'd like to share more details on the coming change.

By removing the ability to customize link metadata (i.e. headline, description, image) from all link sharing entry points on Facebook, we are eliminating a channel that has been abused to post false news. We also understand that many publishers have workflows that rely on overwriting link preview metadata to customize how their content appears to audiences on Facebook. We're committed to a solution that supports them.

Over the past few months we worked with publishers and publishing apps (some of which provide Facebook media solutions, other that are Facebook Marketing Partners) to understand why editing link previews is important to them. We're working to find other solutions that allow publishers to share customized content on our platform, and we will have more to share in the coming weeks. As we make these changes, content creators maintain the ability to control how their links appear on Facebook using Open Graph meta tags. For more information on how to host and preview these changes in your CMS, please refer to our documentation. We're also working directly with apps that support media publishers to manage this upcoming change for their clients.

We will provide the tools and resources publishers and apps need to accommodate the coming changes.

Our goal is to support publisher workflows and app functionality, while limiting malicious misrepresentations of underlying link content. As content customization evolves we continue to work closely with our partners to support the best tools for sharing links on Facebook.