Facebook is getting more precise in its fight
against clickbait.
After training its news feed algorithm to
recognize clickbait headlines last year and penalize the sites and Pages
associated with these posts, Facebook will now target individual posts that
link to articles that overpromise and underdeliver, in order to better isolate
and eliminate the clickbait trying to invade people’s news feeds.
Previously, Facebook considered website domains
or Facebook Pages at large when hunting for clickbait. That helped its system
to broadly identify bad actors that push out a lot of clickbait, but it also
made it harder to quarantine the occasional clickbait from an otherwise
reputable publisher. Now, by taking into account individual posts, Facebook can
strike down these one-off offenses without leveling an entire publication or
needing to wait for a publication’s clickbait volume to mount.
Facebook’s algorithm will also now distinguish
between headlines that withhold information and headlines that exaggerate the
story. The divide-and-conquer tactic is supposed to make Facebook’s system more
effective when evaluating whether a post links to a clickbait, per a company blog
post published on Wednesday.
That post isn’t clear on exactly how the change
helps. But since Facebook is running a bunch of headlines through its computers
so those computers can learn what a clickbait headline looks like, it’s
possible that the computers had a hard time finding those patterns when
considering a headline like “When He Opened the Door, He Didn’t Know He’d Be
Met by This…” and one like “This Article Will Change Your Life.” The first
headline uses a lot of plain language, whereas the second has common clickbait
keywords like “change” and “your life.” So most likely Facebook’s computers
needed to separately learn the first headline type to more accurately
understand its characteristics, which is exactly how Facebook has trained its
computers to distinguish between these two types of headlines.
“We categorized hundreds of thousands of
headlines as clickbait or not clickbait by considering if the headline
exaggerates the details of a story, and separately if the headline withholds
information. A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these
criteria, validating each other’s work to identify large sets of clickbait headlines,”
according to Facebook’s blog post.
Facebook will also start to test fighting
clickbait in other languages besides English. Sometime in the coming weeks, its
algorithm will begin to evaluate posts that are written in Arabic, Chinese,
French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese.
References
References
Peterson, T. (2017, May 17). Facebook now pinpoints
individual posts to keep clickbait out of the News Feed. Retrieved from
MarketingLand: http://marketingland.com/facebook-now-pinpoints-individual-posts-clickbait-214935
