Facebook's New Anti-Clickbait Algorithm Buries Bogus Headlines (techcrunch.com)

Facebook is going to make some changes to its newsfeed, again, it said on Thursday. The company is now having another go at sweeping clickbait news stories away from people's newsfeed. The move comes as the social networking giant struggles to entice many people from coming back to its service every few hours. Under the new changes to the feed algorithm, articles with headlines that "withhold or distort information" will be classified as distort. Such stories won't completely disappear, but as the company says, will appear less frequently in users' feeds. TechCrunch adds: Facebook manually classified tens of thousands of headlines with a clickbaitiness score to train the new algorithm. Now it can detect headlines like "When She Looked Under Her Couch And Saw THIS... I Was SHOCKED!"; "He Put Garlic In His Shoes And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe"; or "The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless." The algorithm then punishes the entire Page that shared them or site they link to by making all their posts or referral links less visible. Facebook's VP of Product Management on News Feed Adam Moserri said "If you post 50 times a day and post one piece a clickbait, this shouldn't affect you. If you're a spammer and post clickbait all day this should affect you a lot."

Comments

Re:Just one quick trick ...

[Nidi62]

It's bad enough on Facebook, but it's a lot more heinous on mainstream news sites (like CNN.com). A respectable news site has no business exposing their readers to that kind of s%!t. (don't hassle me about calling CNN respectable, they all do it).

Go international. Reuters, Al-Jazeera, etc. I particularly like al-Jazeera because, while they have a lot of videos, their headlines are clear and the site layout is very clean compared to sites like CNN.