Thursday, 4 August 2016

Facebook hates clickbait as much as you do

Facebook hates clickbait as much as you do

"OMG! What this celeb wore to the Golden Globes will make your jaw drop!!!"

"What this little girl says after her first trip to McDonald's is absolutely priceless."

"I ate this superfood for a week and you'll be SHOCKED at my new biceps!"

Chances are, you see headlines like these on Facebook on a regular basis. Deceptive clickbait articles have become somewhat synonymous with the social media experience - something that Facebook plans to rectify, starting today.

The social media giant announced it's putting measures to cut out misleading or withholding headlines from your News Feed in order to encourage more genuine content on the site.

"People have told us they like seeing authentic stories the most," wrote Facebook in an official post. "That's why we work hard to understand what type of stories and posts people consider genuine, so we can show more of them in News Feed."

Clickbait hates them! How this site does it.

Facebook already took measures to slow down clickbait last year, in addition to focusing more on content created by family and friends, rather than sponsored partners, back in June.

The primary method of Facebook's crusade against clickbait is identifying common phrases in the headlines that mislead, exaggerate, or manipulate expectations. (See our joke examples above.)

Combing through thousands of articles to help identify these clickbait-y terms, the company built a system that compares those phrases with appropriate articles to judge their authenticity - something Facebook describes as "similar to how many email spam filters work."

A list of best practices is also provided for content producers to keep in mind when writing posts so that they avoid straying into clickbait territory.

While Facebook warns that the distribution of pages with misleading articles will see a decrease, the company says responsible pages will not likely feel any major changes, which sounds like a win-win to the pages and users alike.

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