There’s nothing more annoying than scrolling through Facebook and seeing a bunch of news about “you’ll never believe what happened next”, “the results will shock you”, “this one ingredient will help you lose 20kg”, and Facebook understands. The social networking company recently announced that they are working harder to eliminate such clickbait news from the News Feed.
Facebook is already filtering out clickbait items, a feature that they introduced two years ago. Sadly though, these news that deliberately leaves out vital information in the headline are still rampant, and the company wants to focus more effort on this.
With the update, Facebook will use a system that identifies phrases that are commonly used in clickbait headlines. They categorise tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by considering two key points:
- If the headline withholds information that is required to understand what the content of the article is
- If the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader.
Facebook will then track the Pages or domains that constantly post clickbait headlines, and their news will appear lower in the News Feed. Fortunately, News Feed will continue to learn over time, which means that if the Page stops sharing clickbait headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this update.
(Source: Facebook Newsroom via: Engadget)
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