Responsible in part for clickbait even existing, Facebook now seeks to destroy it by introducing new detection tools

May 17, 2017 23:04 GMT  ·  By

Facebook wants to kill one of the things it indirectly helped create - clickbait. Following a move to restrict the spread of such articles, Facebook now wants to take things a step further. 

Last year, Facebook announced it was going to put in the effort to restrict the spread of clickbait, going as far as to punish publishers who used this tactic to trick people into clicking on a link. Now, the company has said it will start targeting clickbait on an individual post level instead of analyzing the bulk posts of a page.

More specifically, Facebook will check whether a headline withholds information or if it exaggerates information separately.

"People tell us they don’t like stories that are misleading, sensational or spammy," write Facebook engineers Arun Babu, Annie Liu, and Jordan Zhang in a blog post. "That includes clickbait headlines that are designed to get attention and lure visitors into clicking on a link. In an effort to support an informed community, we’re always working to determine what stories might have clickbait headlines so we can show them less often."

What's more, Facebook also plans to do more about fighting this type of articles in other languages too, not just English.

A complex analysis

According to the company's engineers, Facebook will be looking at headlines trying to detect clickbait situations. It will analyze signals separately, as opposed to trying to determine whether a post or page is guilty of a sum of factors. Basically, if the headline exaggerates the details of a story, or withholds information, they'll get restricted.

The new decision falls in line with other announcements the company made in recent months as it tries to clean up the social network and rid it of clickbait articles and fake news. Although it will probably always reject the name, its actions indicate that Facebook may indeed be coming to terms with the fact that the social network has become one of the primary sources people get their news from.