Facebook is cracking down on clickbait, teaser headlines that encourage people to click through without really telling them what, exactly, it is they're going to see.
In short, the announcement means you can say goodbye to annoying headlines like "Doctors say you should never do this one thing" or "This cute little girl got a new bicycle for her birthday, you won't believe what happened next."
In an official blog post,
Facebook announced that it is tweaking the algorithm that curates users' News Feeds (the page you see when you first login) in order to "help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant, and to continue to weed out stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don’t want to see."
Urgent: Do You Approve Or Disapprove of President Obama's Job Performance? Vote Now in Urgent Poll
Clickbait has proliferated in recent years with the rise of list-style articles (aka "listicles") and social content specifically molded to go viral on sites like Facebook and Twitter. With that rise has come a tidal wave of criticism, with many saying sites that propagate this kind of content are tricking users into clicking with cheap emotional tactics.
"It’s social copy specifically intended to leave out information to create a curiosity gap. Some of it’s disingenuous. It’s not always, but the reader is always being manipulated," Jake Beckman, the creator of @SavedYouAClick,
told The Daily Beast in July. His and a growing number of similar Twitter accounts — like @HuffPoSpoilers — have gained hundreds of thousands of followers in their fight against clickbait. Likewise, parody newspaper The Onion also released a parody clickbait site earlier this year called "The Clickhole" to much fanfare.
Mashable noted that Facebook's changes could spell disaster for some digital media companies that rely on social media to drive traffic. Investors and media critics have in the past criticized sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed — saying their reliance on sites like Facebook are a liability — and Facebook's recent changes validate those criticisms to a large extent.
"A small set of publishers who are frequently posting links with clickbait headlines that many people don’t spend time reading after they click through may see their distribution decrease in the next few months. We’re making these changes to ensure that clickbait content does not drown out the things that people really want to see on Facebook," read another part of Facebook's blog post.
Urgent: Assess Your Heart Attack Risk in Minutes. Click Here.