Facebook is taking measures to supress so-called ‘clcikbait’ articles on peoples newsfeeds (stories with intuiging headlines but little newsworthy content), instead favouring “authentic stories”.
The company will soon be implementing a new anti-clickbait algorithm. Each story in a user’s News Feed is given a score based on how clickbait-like it sounds.
The algorithm acts like a spam filter, sifting through the phrases used and looks for ones similar to those frequently used in clickbait headlines.
Clickbait articles are notorious for using alluring phrases such as “you’ll never guess what happened next” in order to drive web traffic.
Facebook says it can now automatically suppress these stories. The new Facebook technology scans for tell-tale signs of clickbait headlines on its news feed section – phrases such as “you’ll never guess why” and “his response was priceless”.
This scanning technology was created by a team at Facebook who manually reviewed “thousands of headlines” to put together a list of commonly identifiable clickbait traits.
Adam Mosseri, VP of Product Management on News Feed, explains that the frequency of clickbait posts also affects the visibility of the posts or referral links of the offenders.
The algorithm looks at the domain level aside from the Facebook page level so offenders will not be able to create a page and change URLs and continue spamming again.