Facebook Clamps Down On Click-Baiting Headlines

Over the past few months Facebook has made many improvements to its News Feed in order to ensure that its one billion plus users find posts and links that they are most interested in. The world’s largest social network now has click-baiting headlines in its sights. It has become a common practice on Facebook pages these days to divert traffic to websites by crafting headlines that entice users to click. Some of these headlines deliberately leave out information to get the maximum number of users to click through. Facebook is putting an end to this.

There’s a genuine problem with click-baiting headlines. They don’t necessarily reveal what people will see or read once they click through to the internal website. Scammers can put this to use for their nefarious means. Since these posts get a lot of clicks, engagement increases and the post gets shown to more and more people as a result of it.

This keeps legitimate publishers out who don’t participate in click-baiting, and floods users’ News Feeds with irrelevant posts that they might not be interested in. Facebook says that an initial survey revealed that majority of its users are overwhelmingly in favor of headlines that give them an idea of what they’ll read or see when they click through.

Facebook will use a variety of methods to determine what looks like click-bait. One method is to see how much time people spend away from Facebook reading something they’ve clicked through to. If they go and come straight back the social network will think what they saw wasn’t worth their time.

It will also show fewer of these stories in order to see the ratio of people who click on the content as opposed to those who share it or comment on it. If many users click through the post but fewer like or share it upon their return, it will also be considered as a sign that the post had a click-baiting headline.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook