Facebook continues to tweak its News Feed to ensure that its billions of users across the globe only see stories and posts that are most relevant to them and their interests. It continues to ensure that low-quality posts are downranked and that users don’t have to deal with spam in their News Feed, which is where they spend the majority of their time on the world’s largest social network. Video clickbait is next up in Facebook’s crosshairs. The company has said that it will soon eliminate video clickbait from News Feed.
Facebook will actively prevent video clickbait posts from appearing in users’ News Feed. It’s going to target posts that have a fake video play button embedded into an image as well as videos of static images.
Spammers have been exploiting these methods to take advantage of the fact that Facebook’s algorithm promotes videos, particularly longer ones. These methods have been used by spammers to trick users into clicking links that direct them to low-quality websites and also expose them to malicious ads.
Facebook says that publishers who rely on these intentionally deceptive practices should expect to see the distribution of such posts to “markedly decrease.” Most Pages won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed if they have not been using these methods to trick users into clicking on links.
The company adds that the algorithm changes which will demote video clickbait posts are going to roll out for all users across the globe over the next few weeks.
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