UPDATED 23:34 EDT / AUGUST 17 2017

APPS

Facebook takes another shot at killing clickbait by purging deceptive video links

Social media giant Facebook Inc. is taking more steps to purge clickbait content from its news feed, this time focusing on those irksome images of fake video play buttons that often lead to some kind of viral content.

The updates are twofold, Facebook announced on Thursday. One will be to reduce the amount of those fake play buttons, and another will reduce the number of static video images that make their way onto the news feed. Such videos are commonly seen as Facebook promotes video content over textual content.

“Publishers that rely on these intentionally deceptive practices should expect the distribution of those clickbait stories to markedly decrease,” Facebook engineers Baraa Hamodi, Zahir Bokhari and Yun Zhang, wrote in a blog post. “Most Pages won’t see significant changes to their distribution in News Feed.”

The move follows numerous swipes Facebook has taken at reducing or eliminating deceptive content. In May this year the company announced it was cracking down on clickbait and fake news by aiming its algorithm at titles that could be considered clickbait. This could be titles that either hide information or ones that exaggerate information, commonly known as fake news.

Since the epoch of fake news and its role in the U.S. elections, Facebook has been under tremendous pressure to clean itself up. The company also walks a fine line between being seen as an ethical moderator and an oppressor of free speech. Facebook has been accused of manipulating content in the past in favor of its own political leanings.

In an effort to subdue critics, Facebook has said it has no intention of becoming an “arbiter of truth.” In 2016 the company made it possible for users to flag news as “fake” but also employed a number of other fact-checking websites to determine if the news was false.

In 2017 a report by cybersecurity firm Trend Micro Inc. revealed just how damaging fake news could be and how easy, and relatively cheap, it could be disseminated. Hiring a so-called “marketing” firm to write fabricated content and further promulgate it on a number of social media platforms, the report claimed, was not beyond the reach of anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare.

Image: Facebook

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