Here is some good news for those of you annoyed by sensationalized, misleading headlines: Facebook has recently announced changes to the news feed algorithms that will put those spammy stories in front of fewer people.
Clickbaits, spammy articles, sensational stories – who even likes those? According to Facebook, fewer and fewer people. To combat clickbait stories in people’s feeds, the company has made three important updates:
- Clickbaits are now looked at not only the domain and Page level, but at the individual post level as well.
- Facebook will now look at whether a headline withholds information as well as if it exaggerates it separately.
- The company is testing this in additional languages (not only English).
Apparently, Facebook’s new algorithm works in a similar way that an email spam filter does: the researchers looked at thousands of clickbait headlines and identified key phrases used to lure users. Using those, the algorithm is able to find misleading and sensationalized headlines and penalize them by making them show up later in the news feed, and to fewer users.
The company says that this change won’t significantly impact most pages – it will, however, impact those that use clickbaits, as they can expect to see declines in their reach.
Source:
Facebook Newsroom (https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/05/news-feed-fyi-new-updates-to-reduce-clickbait-headlines/)
Digital Trends (https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/facebook-reduces-clickbait-posts/
The Wonderful World of Algorithms 