Facebook Cleaning Up Its News Feed By Reducing Like-Baiting And Spammy Posts

Bad news for spammers and like baiting sites on Facebook, the company is on a house cleaning mode. To make its news feed more engaging so that users spend more time, Facebook is performing a series of improvements to its News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently report as spammy and that they don’t want to see.

Facebook states that, “The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important and relevant to them.”

Improvements to the Facebook News Feed would mean wielding its axe on “Like-baiting”, frequently circulated content and spammy Links.

“Like-baiting” posts which explicitly ask News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive, will henceforth be detected by Facebook and won’t be shown on the News Feed.

Facebook states that: “When we survey people and ask them to rate the quality of these stories, they report that like-baiting stories are, on average, 15% less relevant than other stories with a comparable number of likes, comments and shares.”

However, recent update will not impact Pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans.

Stories from Pages that would be repeated again and again by pages will also be de-emphasized from News Feed. Besides stories in News Feed that use inaccurate language or formatting to try and trick people into clicking through to a website that contains only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads will also be impacted by the new changes.

Facebook informs that, “The update we are making today improves News Feed to reduce cases of these spammy links, and in our early testing we’ve seen a 5% increase in people on Facebook clicking on links that take them off of Facebook – this is a big increase in the context of News Feed and is a good sign that people are finding the remaining content in their News Feed more relevant and trustworthy.”

Facebook has been working for some time now to make its News Feed more engaging to hold its users on its platform. Spam on Facebook has become a nuisance. Last year Facebook along with YouTube were reported to be the networks most infested by spam. This is a sensible move from the social networking giant which is struggling to stop users, specially the teens, from moving out to spend time on other networks.

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