Alarm bells are ringing for websites which have been thriving on plagiarised cat videos and images of half naked women. Facebook has decided to mete out some tough treatment for such publishers who have increasingly adulterated the social network’s News Feed. The biggest social network on the planet, in a bid to make the content appearing on its News Feed more reliable has changed its algorithm to curb clickbait titles. Publications which rely on serving shitty content through misleading headlines to draw users in will be increasingly curtailed and would eventually stop showing in FB’s News Feed. The tech blokes at Facebook have manually handpicked several thousand headlines to train their algorithms to tell a clickbait headline from a genuine one.
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The idea is to dissuade publishers from putting headlines which sound like ‘this man opened his cupboard, and you’d be shocked at what happened next’ for something as trivial as a cat miaow-ing upon opening the darned cupboard. The websites which distort information to mislead audience will disappear from the News Feed as a result, and will increasingly be replaced by sites which offer authentic, informative content with relevant titles.
As a result of the new algorithm, the websites which frequently use clickbait headlines would witness their Page getting increasingly punished. If however, these publishers mend their ways over a period of time, and start serving authentic content, their stories would slowly start appearing in News Feed again. The new algorithm identifies offenders at both website and Facebook Page level. So, the content associated with an offending Page would also affect the associated website in terms of its reputation in the eyes if Facebook.
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To help publishers who have been delivering quality content and want to be white listed, Facebook is also offering some tips and advice. Using exaggerating terms, deliberately withholding information and generally using phrases identified by Facebook as clickbait should be avoided. It doesn’t take rocket science for a Publisher to know if it’s acting oversmart to trap the user in a clickbait net. Facebook, in essence, wants you to stop doing that, if you’ve been doing that, that is.
Facebook wants to rid its network from spammy content and is striving to prioritize friends and family over commercial pages, as it declared in an official statement last month. What this means is, if you’re a well-read, aware guy who cares for quality content, the publishers who actually offer content worth your interest are more likely to appear on you feed, as compared to those who’ve been thriving on cat videos and images of half naked women.