MANILA, Philippines – Facebook is bringing some improvements to its News Feed in the future to weed out clickbait posts – posts that are designed specifically to make people click them by not providing a lot of information at the onset – and to help users find posts and links that are likely to be truly interesting and relevant to them.

According to an August 25 Facebook newsroom post, the two improvements include a reduction in click-baiting headlines as well as helping users “see links shared on Facebook in the best format.”

Fighting clickbait

The change to click-baiting headlines follows two factors the company is using to gauge the relevance of an article shared on Facebook.

The first is looking into how long people spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link. The second is looking at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing content with friends. “If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them,” the post added.

Sharing and link formatting

The second change to combat clickbait refers to how a link is shared by users and the priority Facebook gives to certain formats.

According to Facebook, it has found that “people often prefer to click on links that are displayed in the link format (which appears when you paste a link while drafting a post), rather than links that are buried in photo captions.”

The link format is preferred for its ease of use on mobile devices, as well as having additional information associated with the link. This makes it easier for users to pick what links they want to click on, since there’s contextual information available.

The update to Facebook will prioritize showing links pasted while drafting a post – the link format type – rather than those shared in captions, such as in photos or certain types of status updates.

The updates should make publishers adapt their practices accordingly, and should allow Facebook users to eventually get more of the content they want to actually read through. – Rappler.com