Clickbait headlines are universally despised by nearly everyone on the internet for often being misleading and uninformative. While some outlets do their best to omit a number from their headline (10 ways to make a clickbait headline!), a vast majority do not. As a result, you often see a Facebook feed cluttered with clickbait articles from buzzing outlets that like to feed a drivel of information to the masses. It’s no surprise then that Facebook once attempted to crack down on clickbait articles two years ago but alas it didn’t make much of a difference. Now they’re trying again.
“To address this feedback from our community, we’re making an update to News Feed ranking to further reduce clickbait headlines in the coming weeks. With this update, people will see fewer clickbait stories and more of the stories they want to see higher up in their feeds.”
Facebook is categorising clickbait articles into two main categories it found irks people. The first are headlines that withhold information required to understand the content of a headline, such as “You won’t believed what he did next!”. The second are those headlines that exaggerate the contents of an article, such as “Exercising is actually bad for you, here’s why!”. Both these types of headlines were identified after a team at Facebook analysed thousands of articles.
From there, the social media giant built a system that looks at the set of clickbait headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines. You find that a similar sort of system manages your spam filters in your email inbox. Then the system identifies posts that are clickbait and which web domains and Pages these posts come from. Links posted from or shared from Pages or domains that consistently post clickbait headlines will appear lower in News Feed.
However, News Feed will continue to learn over time — if a Page stops posting clickbait headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change, giving them a chance to redeem themselves.
This is the latest in a slew of changes the social media company is enacting, they recently started testing end-to-end encryption for Facebook Messenger and is even testing a system that will you buy tickets on the platform.
Source: Facebook
