You’ll Never Guess What Facebook’s New Algorithm Does (Hint: It Punishes Clickbait)

Facebook has announced that it has taken additional steps to reduce the amount of headlines it considered clickbait-y on its News Feed, in a blog post that it published on Thursday. The point of these measures, according to Facebook, is to “show people the stories most relevant to them” and to protect “authentic communication” on its platform.

Basically, Facebook believes that people are not only turned off by clickbait, but that they have grown to greatly resent it over the past few years. Examples of clickbait it cites are headlines such as “You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet” and “Apples Are Actually Bad for You?!”

Fair enough. If you take a look at the News Feed comments section of any such article with a blatantly misleading headline, chances are that it will have at least angry one comment warning people to stay away from it. Facebook understandably wants to clean up its News Feed and keep people coming back to its platform.

In order to accomplish this, Facebook has developed an algorithm that reduces the distribution of posts that fall afoul of two guidelines. The first factor it considers is whether the headline withholds information necessary to understand what the content of the article is. The second is whether headline is bombastic or creates misleading expectations.

Facebook’s updated system evaluates headlines based on these two criteria, identifying clickbait as well as the web publishers these types of posts come from. Pages and domains that consistently post clickbait will then be placed lower on the News Feed.

The New York Times reports that this is not the first time Facebook has taken steps to combat clickbait. In 2014, Facebook began demoting posts that had been “liked” and then “unliked” shortly thereafter and also began assessing the quality of posts based on how long people spent reading them.