Facebook Tweaks News Feed To Further Clamp Down On Clickbait

For years, Facebook Pages have been used as a means of clickbaiting people into clicking through to websites that provide low quality content, but the strategy worked for those who were looking to generate easy traffic. Facebook regularly clamps down on clickbait and has been particularly active against Pages that just share memes and now it’s clamping down on all of that even more.

The goal with News Feed has always been to show uses stories most relevant to them and recent changes mean that they are ranked as such that users see stories from the people most important to them at the top of the Feed.

Facebook says that it has heard from users that they want to see fewer stories with clickbait link titles or headlines. These headlines force people to click because they leave out important details so users have no choice but to click through.

The social network says that it’s making an update to News Feed which will further reduce clickbait headlines in the coming weeks. It promises that users will see fewer clickbait stories once this update has been rolled out for everybody.

Facebook has developed a system which will categorize clickbait headlines by identifying phrases commonly used in them. It has categorized tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by considering two key points: if the headline withholds information on purpose that’s required to make people understand what the post is about and if it creates misleading expectations for the reader.

As a result of this, clickbait headlines will now rank lower in News Feed and your user experience will improve even more so because the posts you actually care about will get more space up top.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook, News Feed