Social media site Facebook has announced that it will be curbing the amount of spam, or ‘clickbait’, that appears on the news feeds of its users by introducing a new update to its service.
It is believed that as part of this upgrade, the site will monitor how long users spend reading certain news articles in a bid to prioritise and provide the best possible content. It has identified that with ‘spammy’ content, users will click on the links to be taken to a page, where they spend no more than a few moments before returning to the social platform to find something of more interest – i.e, something not considered to be clickbait.
The social network has posted a statement on its online newsroom which states that this type of post has a purpose of getting as many clicks as possible, which results in the posts getting shown to more users and appearing more on news feeds.
Facebook conducted some research into this topic, discovering that up to four out of every five users prefer to view content in their news feeds that helps them decide whether they wanted to see the full article before clicking.
As part of its plans to limit this clickbait, the social site also plans to observe how much a certain post is liked and shared to determine how valuable the content would be to users, with the company estimating that only a “small set of publishers” will feel the effects of this strategy.
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