Facebook has announced some changes in its News Feed algorithm, aimed particularly to crack down the links to “low-quality websites” along with deceptive ads which lead users to such websites.
So what exactly will now come under a ‘low quality website’ ? According to Facebook, websites “containing little substantive content, and that is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.” This encompasses adult ads, interstitial ads, or other fancy but obscure ads of slimming products or foot fungus.
This step may act as a pioneering step in eradicating fake news from the platform, as most of the culprits spread fake information by masking them behind ads, and also achieve financial motivation from such ads.
While speaking with TechCrunch, Facebook’s product manager for News Feed Greg Marra, tells that this update is the aftermath of a survey conducted between people to know what disturbed their News Feed experience. One point that prominently kept rising was the links that led them to “misleading, sensational, spammy, or otherwise low-quality experiences . . .[including] sexual content, shocking content, and other things that are going to be really disruptive.”
This update is crucial considering the fact that if users do not feel secure by clicking a particular linking, they may reducing clicking on any available link. This will directly hamper Facebook’s advertisement revenue. Once a user gets caught into a spam site, he is irritated and eventually he doesn’t participate in content sharing and ad viewing any further.
It is not the first time Facebook has take such steps towards such deceptive links. In its 2014 News Feed update, the company tried to suppress the the prevalence of links to low-quality sites, by cutting down the websites from which the users returned to their wall immediately after viewing the sites content.
To implement this update, Facebook has gone through a bunch of web pages to deduce which one of them have got low quality contents. The data gathered is used to train the AI system to scan for the links shared on the News Feed and then tallying it with the low-quality data set. Such sites are then blocked from purchasing Facebook ads.
The parameters on which the ads will be classified as low quality by Facebook are:
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A disproportionate volume of ads relative to content. This includes advertisements, and not legal obligations such as cookie policies or logins to private content, such as paywalls.
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Featuring sexually suggestive or shocking content. See relevant policies for Sensational Content and Adult Content.
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Pages that contain malicious or deceptive ads which include Prohibited Content as defined in our policies.
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Use of pop-up ads or interstitial ads, which disrupt the user experience.
If Facebook manages to convince its audience that whichever link they click on their platform, they will be lead to a quality content, the service may continue to reign the social networking world for many more years.
