Facebook has announced that in order to promote "authentic content", its algorithms will now target and remove video clickbait from the News Feed.
Facebook's News Feed algorithm, which promotes videos, has been exploited by spammers time and time again to populate users' News Feeds with a static image disguised as a video which, upon clicking, would lead the person to a low quality website or load a malicious ad. Sometimes, fake video play buttons may be displayed on an image or there might be a video of a static image only.
Facebook. Reuters
Facebook engineers Baraa Hamodi, Zahir Bokhari, and Yun Zhang, wrote in a blog post “Publishers that rely on these intentionally deceptive practices should expect the distribution of those clickbait stories to markedly decrease. Most Pages won’t see significant changes to their distribution in News Feed.”
This news comes after Facebook is said to be testing a feature in the Facebook News Feed that provides links to news on topics of interest to individual users as the company continues to search for ways to increase the amount of time that people spend using the world's largest social media network.
The offering, called "Featured Topic", is being tested on News Feed, the core of Facebook. Each selected item includes a couple of sentences of text on a subject, a link to a news story and a photo, according to an example seen by Reuters on 17 August.
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