Facebook Clamping Down On ‘Engagement Bait’ Posts

Clickbait articles was a problem that Facebook had not too long ago, and the company was working on ways to try and clamp down on them. However it looks like they’ve got a new “bait” problem in the form of “engagement bait”, which is where posts are created in a way to get people to engage with it.

For example you’ve probably come across posts that are captioned like, “Click LIKE if you think that waffles are better than pancakes!” or posts asking for a different reaction for a different image, like they’re trying to take a poll. This is something that facebook wants to cut down on, and will start pushing posts like these further down the News Feed.

According to the social media company, “People have told us that they dislike spammy posts on Facebook that goad them into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions.” This means that starting from now, posts that are deemed to be “engagement bait” will rank lower in the News Feed, and pages, publishers, and others who use engage in these kind of practices will also see their reach diminished for all their posts.

In a way this is similar to how Google works, in which that users who don’t comply with their rules get ranked lower in search. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of spam that users seed on their feed, but we suppose alternatively users can always unfollow those pages or hide them if this doesn’t work out.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook