Elaborating on the move, Facebook posted on its blog that it's introducing a series of improvements to News Feed to reduce stories that users frequently flag as spam. "Many of these stories are published by Pages that deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would," said Facebook employyes Erich Owens and Chris Turitzin.
Facebook will essentially take steps to counter three kinds of news feed spam - Like-baiting, frequently circulated content and spammy links.
Facebook says "Like-baiting" is when posts explicitly ask readers to like, comment or share the post, to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive. " The improvement we are making today better detects these stories and helps ensure that they are not shown more prominently in News Feed than more relevant stories from friends and other Page," said the Facebook executives.
The update will not impact Pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, Facebook clarified.
Facebook is also improving News Feed so that it doesn't focus on pages that reshare content as most users do not find such content relevant.
Stories that misguide users into clicking on links to pages that contain only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads, will also be restricted. For instance some stories may claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads, the social networking giant iterated.
"By measuring how frequently people on Facebook who visit a link choose to like the original post or share that post with their friends, we've been able to better detect spammy links," it added. According to Facebook, the update improves News Feed to reduce cases of spammy links, and in early testing it has witnessed a 5% increase in people on Facebook clicking on links that take them off of Facebook.
Ref - TOI
No comments:
Post a Comment