Facebook Says It Will Stop Spamming You
Your Facebook newsfeed will change again, and that’s because the social media giant wants you to be better informed.
Facebook announced on Wednesday that it is releasing a new update in the coming months to stop users seeing messages and ads in their news feed that refer to a “poor web experience.” A low-quality website is subjective, but Facebook has clearly defined this as “misleading, sensational and spammy” pages, “containing little meaningful content,” or inundated with ads. “This way, people will be able to see fewer misleading messages and more informative messages,” writes Facebook.
“Disruptive, shocking, or malicious”
The company says it has checked hundreds of thousands of web pages that the platform links to to assess which content is non-essential or contains many “destructive, shocking or harmful” advertisements. They then used artificial intelligence to discover similar pages on the platform.
After identifying a poor quality web page, the new feed algorithm places the page below the user’s feed and prevents it from being used as an advertisement. Basically, it is a ranking system that creates a hierarchy based on the quality of a web page, saving users from falling asleep with nasty ads or NSFW ads the moment they visit.
They have done this before.
Sounds familiar? This is because Facebook has already used this tactic to combat clickbaits. The company announced last year that it analyzed thousands of article headlines to determine if they were click-baiting (think, “How to Lose 95 Pounds in Less Than One Week”). Using this data, they developed a software algorithm that efficiently scores web domains and pages for their decoy violations, and this score determines their status in the news feed – much like the new algorithm.
“This is one of the first times we actually use the experience people get when they click something to increase their ranking in the news feed,” Product Manager Greg Marra told Recode .
But how does this affect fake news?
One of the practical results of this change is how it will affect the prevalence of “fake news” on social media. It’s no secret that Facebook has a problem with fake news – an issue that washighlighted during the 2016 presidential election. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied the allegations – he claimed 99 percent of the content on the platform is real – our subsidiary site Gizmodo said the company was aware of the problem and even had access to a tool that could block fake content.
Following criticism and accusations, the company banned fake news sites from using its internal ad network. Facebook has also created a new, easier method to remove fake news posts: Users can easily report a fake story by clicking in the upper-right corner of a post, and when enough posts have been made, a third-party fact checker evaluates the link to determine its authenticity.
Now, with an update to a new AI algorithm, Facebook is taking another blow at fake news sites from a different angle. Since many sites that contain inaccurate information are also low quality sites, they run the risk of getting low rankings. And as TechCrunch points out, fake news creators are largely driven by financial incentives and flood their content with ads.
Just remember: Facebook makes you less likely to come across fake content; they don’t eliminate it.