Facebook News Feed Revamped To Reduce Clickbait Stories

Facebook is coming down hard on clickbait headlines. The social networking site announced Thursday it’s changing its algorithm so fewer clickbait stories make it to the News Feed.

“One of our News Feed values is to have authentic communication on our platform. People have told us they like seeing authentic stories the most,” the company said in a blog post, “To address this feedback from our community, we’re making an update to News Feed ranking to further reduce clickbait headlines in the coming weeks.”

Facebook has identified thousands of phrases commonly used in clickbait headlines and categorized clickbait headlines into two types: headlines that withhold information required to understand the context of the article and those that exaggerate the article thereby misleading the reader.

Facebook’s new system will identify which websites and pages these clickbait stories comes from and links posted from those pages will appear lower in the News Feed. Once the page stops posting such links, the News Feed’s algorithm will no longer punish it.

“We want publishers to post content that people care about, and we think people care about headlines that are much more straightforward,” Facebook’s vice president for product management of News Feed Adam Mosseri reportedly said.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has tried to clamp down on clickbait stories on the News Feed. In August 2014, the social network announced it was introducing two new updates to identify and do away with clickbait stories. The updates classify clickbait stories based on the amount of time readers spend on the story and the number of likes it gets.