If you’re on Facebook, chances are you see plenty of posts that ask for likes, shares, and other types of interactions. Some of them try to lure you win with contents that have prizes which sound too good to be true. Others simply appeal to your sense of camaraderie, asking for a like, share or comment just because you may feel like you’re belonging to something special.
But Facebook is finally declaring war to engagement bait on Facebook.
The company on Monday announced that it’s taking action because people have told Facebook they dislike such spammy posts. It appears that it finally worked.
What Facebook did was to feed hundreds of thousands of posts to a machine learning model, after reviewing and categorizing them. That way, the computer can now detect different types of engagement bait, and posts that fit these categories will be shown less in your feed.
Furthermore, Pages that use engagement bait to boost their stats will be demoted in the following weeks.
This should also help Facebook on a different front, stopping fake news from going viral:
[We] will demote posts that go against one of our key News Feed values — authenticity. Similar to our other recent efforts to demote clickbait headlines and links to low-quality web page experiences, we want to reduce the spread of content that is spammy, sensational, or misleading in order to promote more meaningful and authentic conversations on Facebook.
Facebook says that posts that ask people for “help, advice, or recommendations, such as circulating a missing child report, raising money for a cause, or asking for travel tips, will not be adversely impacted by this update.”
