Facebook is all set with its new filtering scheme to recommence its battle against the clickbait posts, by providing a more precise information regarding which post is to be cracked down from the News Feed. This time it will also demote individual posts just web domains and Facebook Pages.
This upgrade is tied up with the News Feed algorithm change which Facebook is rolling out today in order to restart the combat it began in 2014 against fake and exaggerated news. However, the battle only began with English language and is now extending to other languages as well.
Facebook wrote:
“Publishers that rely on clickbait headlines should expect their distribution to decrease. Pages should avoid headlines that withhold information required to understand the content of the article and headlines that exaggerate the article to create misleading expectations. If a Page stops posting clickbait and sensational headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change.”
Facebook is now able to detect clickbait posts in languages like Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Thai, Portuguese and Vietnamese along with English. These languages were selected because they are most common and frequently spoken one and maximum number of people would be redeemed from the clickbaits by targeting these languages.
The News Feed visibility of the posts which qualify to be clickbait will be cracked down instead of just reducing its reach on Facebook pages and other domains.
The update is crucial because too many people are irritated by such extremely exaggerated news headlines and cease to click on any some other relevant links as well. This automatically hampers its ad revenue and the legitimate referral traffic that give Facebook its power.
Using this as a tool, Facebook would pioneer in cleansing the internet with its most prominent plague. While that centralized authority can allow it to squash startups, upend journalistic business models, and sway privacy norms in unsettling ways, at least here it could have a positive impact.
