Facebook updating its news feed algorithm to downrank Clickbait

Facebook has emerged as a big content platform where everybody is creating and sharing content. However, most of this content is not what anybody want to see. This means that a huge amount of content created that is created is not relevant or useful. As part of an ongoing effort to show relevant and informative content, the Facebook News Feed algorithm just received an update. Last year, the social network made an update to the News Feed to reduce stories from sources identified consistently posted clickbait headlines.

According to a post on Facebook’s newsroom, it is making three updates that build on this work so that people will see even fewer clickbait stories in their feeds, and more of the stories they find authentic. These include:

• Taking into account clickbait at the individual post level in addition to the domain and Page level, in order to more precisely reduce clickbait headlines.
• In order to make this more effective, it is dividing its efforts into two separate signals — so it will now look at whether a headline withholds information or if it exaggerates information separately.
• It is starting to test this work in additional languages.

Facebook clarified that this news feed algorithm update should not affect pages in any significant way. However, sources which rely on clickbait should expect their News Feed distribution to decrease.