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Facebook Planning to Suppress ‘Click-Bait’ Articles

Facebook Planning to Suppress ‘Click-Bait’ Articles

Facebook has recently announced that the social media network is going to crack down on all of those articles which have headlines of click bait. Click baiting is an activity when the publisher posts the links along with headlines in order to encourage the people to click on it for seeing more. They do not offer a lot of information to the people regarding what they are going to view.
These changes have been made by Facebook because the users were asked about the kind of content which they prefer in their news feed. This was asked through a survey. According to the results, 80% of the users stated that they gave preferences to headlines which helped them in deciding if they wanted to have full articles to read before they click on the link. Facebook also stated that this feature can help in drowning out the content from the pages and friends which people actually want to read.
It has also been announced by Facebook that links need to be posted in the link format rather than sharing them in the captions of status updates and photos. The posts which contain links in captions will be provided with lesser preference in the News Feed.

Methods of Determination

Facebook has also stated that the format of link makes it easy for the users to know if they want to see the content. If you want to determine if content is click bait, then you can use the following two methods for making the decision:
1. Facebook is going to find out the time spent by people on the link after clicking through it. In case the users navigate away at the same time, then it is suggested that they did not find anything that they were looking for in the link.
2. Facebook is also going to work on the ratio of people who click on the content as compared with that of commenting and sharing. In case a large number of people click on the links without even commenting and liking the post at the time of returning, it might be a click bait article.

Click Bait Websites

The click bait websites notice change in the news feed. Facebook also started adding [Satire] tagging of articles which were being published by news parody websites and The Onion. This kind of tagging appears in the box of “related articles” found under the links which are posted and that appear only if you see the entire article. Facebook also stated that it will penalize those pages which post content repetitively. It is going to encourage like baiting in the near future.
Like baiting is when the posts ask readers of the News Feed to like and comment on a post directly. As facebook drives a lot of traffic to the websites which publish articles therefore, it is giving a very strong significance to the changes in the News Feed.