Facebook to publishers: Stop posting clickbait

If there's one constant at Facebook it's that your News Feed will change.

The company is once again adjusting the algorithm that powers News Feed. The changes are (again) aimed at reducing the amount of "clickbait" in users' feeds.

With the changes, which will arrive over the next couple weeks, Facebook is using two key factors to define clickbait (emphasis their own): 

(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 misleadingexpectations for the reader

Links from pages that routinely post these types of headlines will be demoted in users' News Feeds, Facebook said.

While these changes are new, clickbait is an issue Facebook has addressed before (and likely will address again). The social network previously made a change that tried to reduce clickbait based on the amount of time people spent reading a given link. If a user clicked on a link but navigated back to Facebook quickly, then the quality of that post was likely lower than those with more time spent, the thinking went. 

However, as Mashable's business editor Jason Abbruzzese noted at the time, relying on time spent may not have been the most effective way to reduce the problematic content, since it also favored big-name publishers with overall higher engagement. 

The newest change appears to use more precise methods for weeding out clickbait-style headlines. "The system looks at the set of clickbait headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines," Facebook said in a statement, noting its system functions a lot like an email spam filter. 

Facebook says it doesn't anticipate that most publishers will be negatively impacted by the change, though it's difficult to know for sure what the effect will be until the update rolls out. If publishers suffer, Facebook proposes a simple solution: 

"If a Page stops posting clickbait headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change."