On Thursday, Facebook announced the latest salvo in its roughly two-year-old war against clickbait posts.
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 (“You won’t believe which social network just dropped an atom bomb on the media industry!!!”).
They flagged “tens of thousands” of these headlines as clickbait and fed them into a system that parsed them for phrases that were common among the clickbait cohort but not among the non-clickbait group.
“This is similar to how many email spam filters work.” Facebook data scientist Alex Peysakhovich and user experience researcher Kristin Hendrix wrote in the company blog post announcing the latest attempt to eradicate clickbait.
Whether the latest effort will lead to a “Mission Accomplished” banner flying in Menlo Park is anyone’s guess. As it has before, Facebook isn’t only targeting individual posts with the latest change but also the Pages that publish them.
Oh ok, good luck Facebook.