Facebook is changing the algorithm to reduce clickbait stories on the News Feed. This is to provide relevant articles to each user on Facebook.
The company's goal with the News Feed is to provide the most relevant stories to people. Facebook said that they heard feedbacks from users saying that they want authentic stories in their News Feeds. The users complained about clickbait stories and they specifically want these reduced. So, the company took steps to reduce them. The will be releasing an update that will change Facebook's algorithm, thus reducing the clickbait articles, according to a Facebook blog post.
Facebook identified thousands of commonly used clickbait phrases in headlines and divided clickbait articles into two category: those articles which are exaggerated thereby misleading readers and those that withhold information which is required to understand the context in their headlines, International Business Times reported.
The new algorithm is designed to identify pages and websites that are posting clickbait stories and will then punish those pages. Posts and stories from punished pages will appear lower in the News Feed. The punishment will only be stopped once the page stops posting such links.
According to the company, there will be no significant changes to the post distribution of most Pages as a result of this update. However, Facebook warns those Pages that rely on clickbait headlines as they would see less distribution on Facebook.
This is not the first attempt that Facebook made in reducing the clickbait articles in the News Feed of users. In fact, the company released an update in 2014 that classifies clickbait stories using the amount of time that the readers spend on the story. This algorithm also utilizes the number of likes that a post gets in order to determine whether the article is clickbait or not. The announcement was also made on a company's blog post.
