Facebook is strengthening their fight against clickbait material that pops up on user’s News Feeds. Previously, Facebook updated its news feed algorithm to recognize clickbait headlines and penalize the websites associated with these posts. Facebook has gone even deeper into this fight with its new strategy against clickbait. The social media giant will now target individual posts that link to articles that overpromise or do not deliver to what their headline states. This new strategy will allow Facebook to better isolate and eliminate clickbait from news feeds.
When hunting for clickbait, Facebook targeted websites and Facebook Pages. This helped its system to broadly identify offenders that pushed out a lot of clickbait. However, it also made it harder to isolate the occasional clickbait from an otherwise reputable publisher. By targeting individual posts, Facebook can strike down these one-off offenses without penalizing an entire page or needing to wait for a page’s clickbait volume to increase.
Facebook stated that pages will not see big changes to their reach on their posts. Those who are caught will no longer be affected by this strategy when they stop posting clickbait articles. Facebook will be teaching its computers to tell the difference between headlines that withhold information and headlines that exaggerate the story. This will be a more effective tactic in the fight against clickbait.