Facebook is due to start hiding posts from people who spam users’ news feed with clickbait, sensationalised and misinformative articles.
In a statement, the social media giant said it was making the update “to reduce low quality links” in users’ news feed.
Facebook said it carried out research which showed that a small group of users were “routinely sharing vast amounts of public posts per day”, which was effectively spamming people’s feeds.
The study showed that the same people, who were sharing vast amounts of public posts, were also sharing low quality content.
As a result of the research, Facebook said it would “deprioritise” posts being shared from those accounts.
The new policy will only apply to links for individual articles and domains – pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates will not be affected.
Facebook said it aimed to make people’s news feed more “informative”.
It said: “By taking steps like this to improve news feed, we’re able to surface more stories that people find informative and reduce the spread of problematic links such as clickbait, sensationalism and misinformation.”
Independent
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