Good news for all you anti-click bait whiners out there — Facebook has heard your pleas and will try to filter out news headlines from your newsfeed that engage in this nefarious practice.
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Facebook on Monday said that it plans to make some changes to users’ news feeds to “reduce click-baiting headlines,” which it defined as “when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see.” And because headlines like these tend to get lots of clicks — after all, news outlets wouldn’t utilize them if they didn’t — they tend to show up higher on users’ news feeds.
“When we asked people in an initial survey what type of content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through,” Facebook explained. “Over time, stories with ‘click-bait’ headlines can drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about.”
Here at BGR, we welcome these changes because click baiting is truly a cheap practice that we would never in a million years stoop to doing.
