LONDON: If you are tired of those click-bait headlines on your Facebook News Feed, Facebook has some good news for you!
Facebook is going to apply its new anti-clickbait algorithm which will not ban or delete those clickbaity headlines but will keep them out of your reach.
Facebook will categorize tens of thousands of headlines as clickbait by considering these two key points.
- If the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is.
- If the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader. For example, the headline “You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet…” withholds information required to understand the article (What happened? Who Tripped?) The headline “Apples Are Actually Bad For You?!” misleads the reader (apples are only bad for you if you eat too many every day). 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 algorithm examine the phrases which are often used in clickbait headlines but not in authentic headlines, the algorithm works as similar as email spam filter.The system not only check from which page the news is coming from but also look into which domain and pages these news are from.
“If you post 50 times a day and post one piece of clickbait, this shouldn’t affect you. If you’re a spammer and post clickbait all day, this should affect you a lot”.
– Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP of Product Management
However, if the page improves and doesn’t apply clickbait techniques, then the content will get the green light from the algorithm and will be in the public reach.
The algorithm is a hope for those who are actually publishing the legitimate content and as a result they will get a boost for their post and broader post reach.
