L-R: Martin Schulz, Mark Zuckerberg and Mathias Doepfner attended the presentation of the first Axel Springer Award on February 25, 2016 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo : Getty Images/Frank Zauritz - Pool)
Facebook is now planning to prioritize real news articles on the social network as they try to punish "clickbait" stories in terms of less traffic and exposure with a new News Feed algorithm.
Clickbait stories are creative headlines that aim to garner a lot of clicks for web traffic to a site. Most of them are just junk articles with a short video or even a false story just go get more visitors to gain more ad views.
The social network giant has already planned to demote shared links with clickbait stories in the past with an alteration in their algorithm. Now, Facebook is planning to make more changes to put them to the ground and let the real news stories rise up.
Facebook announced that they will be classifying certain types of headlines as clickbait particularly the ones that do not actually have valuable information, the New York Times has learned. The company said that those types of headlines will be seen less in the News Feed compared to before as they could easily get likes and shares making it unfair for those posting real news stories.
The clickbait headlines do not really carry much about the article itself. Headlines should contain a brief summary of what the story is about and clickbait articles usually have no content at all hence the need for creative headlines.
Some popular examples given by Facebook themselves include: "The Dog Barked at the Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless" or "When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS... I was SHOCKED!"
Facebook is now implementing a new tool that works like an email spam filter for clickbait articles on the social network, Slate reported. The new algorithm would also help prioritize the real news articles that actually have good content as opposed to the useless clickbait articles posted to gain more views on subpar websites.
The social network giant will also be targeting headlines that mislead the user with false information. For instance, the headline "Apples Are Actually Bad For You?!" will be penalized because it is misleading to the billions of readers on Facebook.
Facebook is silently implementing the new algorithm and clickbait filter on the social network. Users across the globe could see less and less clickbait headline articles in the following weeks.
