Facebook wants to block clickbait with this one weird trick
Social media platforms have become a haven for clickbait titles, which try to trick users into following a link with vague descriptions such as “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS … ”
Facebook Inc. says it wants to put a stop to clickbait for good, so today the social network announced a few changes to its news feed that are aimed at burying both clickbait and fake news.
Facebook said that it will be adding three new features to its approach to fighting clickbait. First, Facebook says that it is now taking clickbait titles into account for individual posts rather than for pages or domains only. This means that instead of lowering distribution only for repeat offenders, Facebook will lower specific posts that have clickbait titles.
Facebook will also be dividing the signals it uses to track clickbait into two categories: titles that hide information, and titles that exaggerate information. The second category is especially relevant for fake news, which Facebook has been struggling to eliminate over the last few months.
Finally, Facebook announced that it is also expanding these features to other languages with plans to add more in the future.
According to Facebook, most pages will probably not see much of an impact from the news feed changes, but the company said that publishers that frequently use clickbait titles may want to change their ways if they want to keep getting views.
“Publishers that rely on clickbait headlines should expect their distribution to decrease,” Facebook engineers Arun Babu, Annie Liu and Jordan Zhang explained in a blog post. “Pages should avoid headlines that withhold information required to understand the content of the article and headlines that exaggerate the article to create misleading expectations. If a Page stops posting clickbait and sensational headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change.”
This is not the first time Facebook has tried to fight the never-ending tide of clickbait on the social network, and if history is any indication, it likely will not be the last. In 2014, Facebook started tracking clickbait titles by monitoring links that led people to click and then quickly return to the News Feed. “If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted,” Facebook explained at the time.
More recently, Facebook introduced a feature in August that monitors phrases commonly found in clickbait titles such as “you’ll never believe.” Facebook said that this feature works similarly to email spam filters.
Photo of CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook
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