Facebook is making changes to its News Feed again but this time to curb clickbait. The social network announced it will be tweaking its News Feed algorithm to cut down on how often users see “clickbait”.
Facebook said in a blog post,
We’ve heard from people that they specifically want to see fewer stories with clickbait headlines or link titles. These are headlines that intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead people, forcing people to click to find out the answer
The update is aimed at letting users see fewer clickbait stories and more of the stories they want to see higher up in their feeds. Facebook categorized tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by considering two key points: if the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is and if the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader. A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify a large set of clickbait headlines.
The social network will now identify posts that are clickbait and which web domains and Pages these posts come from. With the change in the algorithm links posted from or shared from Pages or domains that consistently post clickbait headlines will appear lower in News Feed. News Feed will continue to learn over time and if a Page stops posting clickbait headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change.