Facebook today announced that it will penalize low quality links that are shared with an unusually high frequency on the social network, considered as spam, to reduce its influence on users’ news threads and prevent misinformation.
According to the Facebook blogger Adam Mosseri explained in the corporate blog, the update is aimed at a “tiny group of people” who routinely share “huge amounts of posts a day.”
“Our research shows that the links they share tend to include low-quality content like ‘click bait’, sensationalism and misinformation,” Mosseri said.
As a result, Facebook “will reduce the priority” of these links that spammers share more frequently than other users to maintain the informative nature of their walls.
The penalty will affect only the links, which may be for example articles, but not domains, pages, videos, photos, location or status updates, debuted the manager.
According to the technology portal Recode, the change in algorithm will affect the articles shared more than 50 times a day by this type of users, which the company does not consider to be robots.
“These links are disproportionately problematic … It’s one of the strongest signs we’ve come across to identify a wide range of problematic content,” added Mosseri.
The manager stressed that one of the crucial values that govern the management of the Facebook wall is that it be “informative.”
“By taking steps like this to improve the wall, we will be able to bring to the surface more stories that people consider informative and reduce the spread of problematic links like ‘clickbait, sensationalism and disinformation,” he said.
This Thursday, Facebook also announced that it would make changes to the social network wall so users see more updates from their friends and family, in line with the goal of community building advocated by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
