Over the past year, Facebook has made several changes to its News Feed algorithm to ensure the posts you see are legit. Now, the social network is at it again, this time tweaking the News Feed to reduce the visibility of links to misleading, ad-covered pages.
Facebook announced the change today in a blog post that over the coming months it will begin rolling out an update intended to create a “more informative experience” by reducing such low-quality posts by cutting off the economic incentives of financially-motivated spammers.
With the update, Facebook says it will be increasing enforcement on spam ads, misleading posts, and also taking into account organic posts that appear in the News Feed.
The social network says that it reviewed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those with little substantive content and that have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads. Facebook then used artificial intelligence to understand whether new webpages that were shared on the network continued the same characteristics.
With this knowledge, Facebook says it can now determine if a post might link to a low-quality web page. If this is the case, the post might show up lower on the News Feed and it may not be eligible to be an ad, the company says.
As a result, Facebook says that once the changes take effect, publishers of content deemed to be of low-quality will begin to see a decline in traffic. Those without low-quality landing pages could see an increase in traffic.
by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist