Tim Peterson says, “There’s a reason this article isn’t titled, “You’ll never guess how Facebook is fighting clickbait now.” Actually, two: 1) You probably could guess; and 2) the phrase beginning that headline is exactly how Facebook is now fighting clickbait.

On Thursday, Facebook announced the latest salvo in its roughly two-year-old war against clickbait posts. Quick thing before we get into the details though: It’s worth pointing out that Facebook kinda instigated the clickbait craze in December 2013,when it decided to reward article links that got a lot of clicks. So let’s not forget the Clickbait-Contra prelude to this war. Okay, onward.

To reduce the number of Facebook posts linking to articles whose headlines promise information that goes undelivered, sometime “in the coming weeks” the social network’s news feed algorithm will scan those posts’ headlines for phrases that often appear in clickbait headlines. Facebook announced this move in a blog post soberly titled, “News Feed FYI: Further Reducing Clickbait in Feed.”

To accomplish this clickbait profiling, Facebook had a team run through thousands of article headlines to identify the ones with headlines that withheld important article content and that inflated readers’ expectations”.

How Facebook is stepping up its whack-a-mole war against clickbait now

Marketing Land

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