Facebook announced it is making another algorithm update to its News Feed in order to show people more informative and entertaining stories.
Along with fake news, Facebook has been fighting links to low-quality content for some time now. And in its efforts to improve users’ experiences in News Feed, it has found that there is a small amount of people on the platform who are sharing a huge amount of content every day. These few are spamming others, and Facebook obviously doesn’t like it. So now it’s working on new ways to show more stories that people will find “informative and entertaining.”
The tiny group of spammers that Facebook has identified, share links that “tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation.” Now, it is working on deprioritising the links that they share. As Adam Mosseri, VP of News Feed at Facebook explains:
[quote]we want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritize the links they share more frequently than regular sharers. Of course, this is only one signal among many others that may affect the ranking prioritization of this type of post.[/quote]
The update will not apply to domains, Pages, videos, check-ins or status updates – only links. This way, Facebook wants to surface more stories that are informative and reduce clickbait, sensationalism and misinformation. The effect on News Feed distribution for most publishers will not be noticeable. However, Facebook explains that “publishers that get meaningful distribution from people who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day may see a reduction in the distribution of those specific links.”
Publishers should still always try to continue to post stories that are relevant and engaging to their audiences.
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