Facebook recently announced some new changes to combat News Feed spam (see: News Feed FYI: Cleaning Up News Feed Spam). In making the announcement, Facebook said:
“The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important and relevant to them. Today we are announcing a series of improvements to News Feed to reduce stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see. Many of these stories are published by Pages that deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would.”
According to Facebook, it is targeting three types of spam – namely: “like-baiting” (when a post explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share a post seeking artificial distribution); frequently circulated content (where photos or videos are uploaded over and over); and “spammy links” (links that trick readers into clicking through to websites containing only ads or a combination of spammy content and ads).
To counter these spam News Feed practices, Facebook will now be working harder to detect “like-baiting” stories to ensure that they are not displayed more prominently than more relevant stories; “de-emphasize” pages with spammy, frequently circulated content; and detect spammy links (based on how often the original post is liked or shared).
According to Facebook, the overall impact on publishers frequently and intentionally creating feed spam will be to decrease their distribution over the coming months. Good news for quality content; bad news for spammers.
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