Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by msmash on from the fixing-your-feed dept.

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."

18 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Just one quick trick ... by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 3, Funny

    To get rid of all those f*ckers. About time, too. Maybe they can apply it elsewhere (hint, hint)?

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    1. Re:Just one quick trick ... by gfxguy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

      --
      Stupid sexy Flanders.
    2. Re:Just one quick trick ... by SirSlud · · Score: 3, Insightful

      People stopped having the right to expect more from journalism when they stopped paying for it.

      --
      "Old man yells at systemd"
    3. Re:Just one quick trick ... by ShaunC · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Perhaps once mainstream sites realize their articles are practically invisible on Facebook, they'll go back to writing proper headlines. I like Facebook's move here, it's a lot like Google penalizing sites that use black hat SEO tactics.

      --
      Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
    4. Re: Just one quick trick ... by tripleevenfall · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Slashdot posters read this story, but couldn't believe what they saw in the entire right column of Slashdot.org...

    5. Re:Just one quick trick ... by Nidi62 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    6. Re:Just one quick trick ... by powerlord · · Score: 4, Funny

      You won't believe THIS easy trick to getting rid of click-bait headlines! ...

      Click HERE to find out more!

      --
      This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
    7. Re:Just one quick trick ... by No+Longer+an+AC · · Score: 2

      The local news has been doing this for as long as I can remember. They'll tease a story during primetime programming. Find out on your local news at 10!

      Okay, so you're wondering what it's all about and it really sounds interesting. The teaser could be about anything, crime, entertainment, the latest fad it doesn't matter. So you tune in. You watch as they go through a few not-very-interesting news stories. You watch a boring weather report and then they cover sports - as if anyone who cares about sports didn't already know if their team won. Then they tease the story some more and cut to commercial.

      Then you finally find out what it was they were teasing you over - and it's not even that interesting.

      Fortunately these days we have the internet at our fingertips so when I see a teaser like that on the local news I can get to the uninteresting part almost immediately and turn off the TV.

    8. Re:Just one quick trick ... by liquidsin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Your UID makes it look like you should remember the old days, but whatever. When I was growing up (80's - 90's) we didn't have cable television; we had an antenna on the roof that picked up the local ABC/NBC/CBS/FOX affiliates, plus the local CBC/CITY/other Canadian stations (grew up in a border town). We got the news from the local nightly news on whichever station, and didn't pay a thing for it, unless you count watching commercials as "paying". These days, we seem to be "paying" more for our news, in terms of ads and having our habits tracked and sold online, but *still* somehow we're getting less *actual* journalism.

      --
      do not read this line twice.
    9. Re:Just one quick trick ... by Solandri · · Score: 2

      Once of the nice things about using Google News as your aggregator is that if you see a clickbait headline for what looks like something you might actually be interested in ("You Won't BELIEVE What the Mars Rover Just Found!"), you can just click the little triangles to the right and get a bunch of related news articles with the same story, and read one of those instead.

    10. Re:Just one quick trick ... by neo00 · · Score: 2

      Yes, but they'll probably just switch to click-bate images rather than click-bate headlines.. It is significantly more difficult to recognize click-bait images with computer algorithms...

    11. Re: Just one quick trick ... by wbr1 · · Score: 2

      I have uBlock... what did you see? WHAT DID YOU SEE???

      --
      Silence is a state of mime.
    12. Re:Just one quick trick ... by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 2

      Even the republicans are attacking trump. it's not like attacking trump is partisan any more.

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  2. I wish they'd all go away. by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 2

    Almost every website you go to now, even sites like CNN, CBS, Forbes, etc., have clickbait ads. The ones that irritate me the most lately are "You won't believe what X looks like now, it's stunning!" where X is some sort of 60's or 70's TV show star. They're in their 50's-80's, I pretty much guarantee they aren't going to look "stunning". They're going to look like old ladies. Nothing wrong with that, it's just the ads seem to imply they somehow magically got better looking over the past 40 years. /end rant

    --
    Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
    1. Re:I wish they'd all go away. by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 2

      I bet they also wonder why people use ad blockers. You don't have to see those ads, you know.

      Unfortunately, I found ad blockers to be almost as much of a problem as the ads. Often times, if you have an ad blocker enabled, you won't be able to view videos on the site.

      --
      Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
  3. Guess which headline FB algorithm doesn't block by gachunt · · Score: 2

    1. "This presidential candidate deleted 30,000 emails, find out what top secret details they revealed."

    2. "A wall to block illegal immigrants? This presidential candidate says it can be done at no cost to America!"

  4. In related news ... by PPH · · Score: 2

    ... Slashdot goes dark.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  5. ...And You Won't Believe What Happened Next! by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Facebook Changed One of it's Algorithms And You Won't Believe What Happened Next!"

    "Facebook Reduced Its Clickbait Using This One Weird Trick!"

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...