Facebook has updated its algorithm earlier today to help diminish the appearance of unreliable links in news feed.
Facebook is aiming to enhance every end user's experience by presenting "informative and entertaining" posts in news feeds. According to a research data gathered by Facebook's team, a small group of people is using the social media platform to spread a huge amount of public links every day and this effectively spams people's feeds.
In a blog post written by Facebook's vice president of Product for News Feed Adam Mosseri, he broke down that most links being shared by this group tend to include low quality content that are but not limited to clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation.
Mosseri further stated that this new regulation is designed to lessen the reach and influence of these spammers and give them less attention in the news feed than the regular shares. However, this change in Facebook's news feed algorithm will only be applied to links to articles but not to entire domains, pages, photos, videos, check-ins, or status updates.
"One of our core News Feed values is that News Feed should be informative", states Mosseri. "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".
Relating to Facebook pages that share links to website pages, this change is not particularly going to affect them. However, Facebook warns that publishers should take into consideration the guidelines that the platform has set in order to prevent from affecting the distribution of one's posts.
Mosseri advises publishers to share "stories that are relevant to their audiences and that their readers find informative".
On other news, Twitter is now looking for ways to regulate its news feed. According to The Washington Post, Twitter will soon be adding a feature for users to flag certain links that are suspected to be conveying fake news and offensive contents.
