14 DAY TRIAL // The fight against annoying websites is being taken to a whole new level by Facebook as the network will start burying ad-filled spam websites and making them vanish from your news feed.
Facebook isn't just now starting its war against these sites that will flood you with ads. In fact, it's been punishing these websites that advertise on Facebook for quite a few months now. Now, however, it is also downranking spammy posts in the News Feed.
Of course, Facebook is phrasing it a bit more nicely by saying these sites are "low-quality." According to their definition, these are sites that contain little substantive content and are covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.
Facebook says the new update is similar to how they're already working to stop misinformation, namely by reducing the economic incentives of financially-motivated spammers.
Pushing up the quality levels on the News Feed
"With this update, we reviewed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads. We then used artificial intelligence to understand whether new web pages shared on Facebook have similar characteristics," Facebook explains. "So if we determine a post might link to these types of low-quality web pages, it may show up lower in people’s feeds and may not be eligible to be an ad. This way people can see fewer misleading posts and more informative posts."
These changes won't just happen overnight, unfortunately. Instead, they'll roll out gradually over the coming months. Publishers that have higher quality pages will likely see an increase in traffic, while publishers who operate such websites will likely see a decline in traffic coming from Facebook.