Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has about two billion monthly active users. It’s now taking a step to weed out low-quality content like clickbait, sensationalism and hoax news after hoax stories had spread widely during the US presidential election, e.g. Pop Francis endorsed Donald Trump and the federal agent, who had been investigating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, was found dead.
Last Friday, Facebook revealed that it was going to change the computer algorithm written for news feed which aims to limit the reach of users, who frequently share links or clickbait content. According to the research done, there are only 0.1 percent people approximately, who share more than 50 posts every day with nuisance content such as fake news or misinformation, clickbait, etc, that create chaos or sensationalism among people.
Facebook aims to discourage the influence of these spammers and deprioritize the links from users that post more frequently on the social site rather than regular or informative and entertaining posts. As a result, it is expected to have a positive effect on the ranking of high-quality content with useful informative posts because this update will apply to individual clickbait articles or links and not on pages, videos, photos or domains.
Once this update is done, publishers will see a reduction in the distribution of links which they routinely share on public posts and they should keep in mind the basic guidelines to follow. In order to reach their audiences through Facebook, the content they post should be relevant and informative. Tackling fake news in the news feed is a part of the new update showing Facebook’s efforts and by August, the update will de-emphasize news or stories with clickbait-type headlines or sub-headlines.