facebook try to reduce clickbait

in #facebook8 years ago


Our goal with News Feed is to show people the stories most relevant  to them — ranking stories so that what’s most important to each person  shows up highest in their News Feeds. When we rank and make improvements  to News Feed, we rely on a set of core values. These values  — which we’ve been using for years — guide our thinking, and help us  keep the central experience of News Feed intact as it evolves. One of our News Feed values is to have authentic communication on our  platform. People have told us they like seeing authentic stories the  most. That’s why we work hard to understand what type of stories and  posts people consider genuine, so we can show more of them in News Feed.  We also work to understand what kinds of stories people find misleading  and spammy to help make sure people see those less. We’ve heard from people that they specifically want to see fewer  stories with clickbait headlines or link titles. These are headlines  that intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead people,  forcing people to click to find out the answer. For example: “When She  Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”; “He Put  Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To  Believe”; or “The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was  Priceless.” To address this feedback from our community, we’re making an update  to News Feed ranking to further reduce clickbait headlines in the coming  weeks. With this update, people will see fewer clickbait stories and  more of the stories they want to see higher up in their feeds. 



How we reduce clickbait headlines


To address clickbait headlines, we previously made an update to News Feed  that reduces the distribution of posts that lead people to click and  then quickly come back to News Feed. While this update helped, we’re  still seeing Pages rely on clickbait headlines, and people are still  telling us they would prefer to see clearly written headlines that help  them decide how they want to spend their time and not waste time on what  they click. We are focusing more effort on this, and are updating News Feed by  using a system that identifies phrases that are commonly used in  clickbait headlines. First, we categorized tens of thousands of  headlines as clickbait by considering two key points: (1) if the  headline withholds information required to understand what the  content of the article is; and (2) if the headline exaggerates the  article to create misleading expectations for the reader. For  example, the headline “You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the  Red Carpet…” withholds information required to understand the article  (What happened? Who Tripped?) The headline “Apples Are Actually Bad For  You?!” misleads the reader (apples are only bad for you if you eat too  many every day). A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines  using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify a large  set of clickbait headlines. From there, we built a system that looks at the set of clickbait  headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait  headlines that are not used in other headlines. This is similar to how  many email spam filters work. Our system identifies posts that are clickbait and which web domains  and Pages these posts come from. Links posted from or shared from Pages  or domains that consistently post clickbait headlines will appear lower  in News Feed. News Feed will continue to learn over time — if a Page  stops posting clickbait headlines, their posts will stop being impacted  by this change. We’ll continue to update how we identify clickbait as we  improve our systems and hear more from people using News Feed. 

Will this impact my Page?


We anticipate that most Pages won’t see any significant changes to their  distribution in News Feed as a result of this change. However, websites  and Pages who rely on clickbait-style headlines should expect their  distribution to decrease. Pages should avoid headlines that withhold  information required to understand what the content of the article is  and headlines that exaggerate the article to create misleading  expectations. As always, Pages should refer to our publishing best practices.  We will learn from these changes and will continue to work on reducing  clickbait so News Feed is a place for authentic communication.