Social networking giant Facebook has recently announced that it plans to change the algorithms around its news feed to ensure that low-quality content appears less frequently to its users.
These algorithms will now seek to provide users with more informative posts, and ensuring that posts containing shocking, malicious content with links to poor web pages are removed from the site.
These changes have been introduced to protect users and to stop spammers becoming more profitable on the platform. The algorithm tweaks have been specifically aimed at websites that contain “little substantive content” and have only been set up in order to profit from the attention users potentially give them.
The company has already stated that it plans to work on methods to stop spammers placing adverts on the platform, and now it plans to do more in terms of “organic posts” that appear in users’ news feeds.
According to Facebook, users have expressed their disappointment when they clicked on links from the site that seemed to point towards a news site, but instead redirected to pages largely built around adverts.
Furthermore, these low-quality pages contained many intrusive interstitial or pop-up ads, or used shocking and inappropriate images for a range of products and services such as dating services and alternative health treatments.
Facebook has said it has conducted an analysis of hundreds of thousands of pages on the internet that helped it to track and identify pages run by spammers. In addition, the company has said that spam sites have a “fingerprint” and this was now being used as a way to spot whether posts on Facebook contain similar characteristics.
Company representatives have revealed that the update to the news feed algorithms would be introduced across its many territories in the coming months. It believes that this change could help the site in its battle against fake news. This fight has been ongoing for some time now and has even led to a media campaign in the UK to help users spot fake news for themselves.
By sinking its teeth into the subject of fake news and its hopes to eradicate it completely, the company is hoping it can help to build a level of trust in the content users are seeing on the platform. This is important to Facebook as it has statistics reveal that the user base for the site is quickly approaching the two billion user mark, further consolidating its position and the world’s largest social media platform.
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