Keeping with the promise it made last summer, Facebook is gearing up with new ways to filter out spammy posts from the users’ news feeds. By spammy posts, Facebook means the posts that are less relevant and those that users do not want to see in their news feeds.
The revamped algorithm will primarily target posts that bait users into liking the post; in Facebook’s terms, ‘like-baiting’ posts that ask users directly to like, share or comment.
According to the company, users find these posts 15 percent less relevant. The new algorithm wouldn’t completely rule out such posts but it would just not display these posts in the prominent places.
The next target is the posts that appear often on a page and pages that post the same pictures often. Such frequently shared content also include text content, photos and videos. The term ‘frequently shared’ doesn’t mean the posts that get a large number of likes, but those that are posted often just for the purpose of appearing on the top of other posts to get attention.
By doing this, Facebook has sent a strong implicit message to companies that they should use the ads service instead of using the same posts to get users’ attention.
There’s going to be a filter for spammy links, too. Spammy links are those that take users to irrelevant pages. It is a smart move to take steps to remove spammy links but the way Facebook used to do it doesn’t seem effective.
These links will be detected by how frequently people like the original post in which the links appear. There are also possibilities of people not liking the post because they were taken to a different page as a result of clicking the link.
