Facebook timing its users to crack down on 'click-baiting' headlines

Social network wants to ensure that spammy stories don’t ‘drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about’


Frustrated with a Facebook feed full of links to news stories that don’t live up to their headlines? Believe it or not, so is Facebook. The social network may be the main funnel of traffic towards sites that overuse “You’ll NEVER believe...” and similar headline formats to elicit clicks, but now the company says it is cracking down on “click-baiting”.


Facebook announced the latest change to its news feed algorithm in a blog post, suggesting that a survey of its users found 80% saying they prefer headlines that help them decide whether an article is worth reading.


“Over time, stories with ‘click-bait’ headlines can drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about,” wrote research scientist Khalid El-Arini and product specialist Joyce Tang.


Facebook’s crackdown will involve lowering the ranking of click-bait links in the algorithm that decides what to show in users’ news feeds, with the company already having revealed that it prioritises 300 out of 1,500 possible stories a day for the average user.


El-Arini and Tang explained that Facebook is measuring how long people spend reading stories after clicking through to them from the news feed, as well as whether they post comments and share the links with friends.


“If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted,” they wrote.


“If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.”


Facebook has warned sites using click-bait headlines that they can expect to see traffic from the social network fall over the coming months.


This is not about websites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, even though they are often accused of being click-bait by their critics. Neither is likely to fall foul of the latest algorithm change, because many people a.) spend time on their stories and b.) go on to comment and share them.


It’s more about the rapidly-proliferating morass of sites below them, trying to game as much traffic from Facebook as possible with tempting-sounding headlines and little more. Less click-bait in the news feed is a positive development, although Facebook is playing a game of whack-a-mole with some of these publishers: as it closes one loophole in its algorithm, they look for another to game.


Facebook’s news feed curation remains a sensitive topic for the social network, though: most recently when it emerged that the company had conducted a study involving 689,000 users, in which friends’ posts were shown or hidden in an effort to prove whether this could affect their mood.


A number of companies running Facebook pages have also complained that their posts only reach a fraction of the people that have Liked them, suggesting that Facebook’s commercial motivations – wanting them to pay to advertise on the social network – overly influence its news feed algorithm.


That raises an intriguing question given Facebook’s latest announcement: will websites with click-bait headlines be able to continue drowning out stories that people really care about by paying for distribution? The answer will be in your feed soon. Well, at least it will, once it’s not full of videos of friends and family members pouring ice buckets over their heads...



Guardian.com