Facebook which has 2 billion monthly active users, has recently made some tweaks to its’ computer algorithm meant to weed out some of the many spammers and fake news planters. The social media giant has made it a priority to stop the spread of so called “fake news” since the election, that many believe Facebook’s platform helped play a large part in being staged. Facebook recently announced they would give lower priority to links that lead to pages full of deceptive or annoying ads. Another separate algorithm update was also recently implemented to downgrade the emphasis of stories with clickbait-style headlines.
Latest Changes
The latest change is designed to reduce the influence of supposedly “tiny group” of people it has identified who share vast amounts of spammy public posts daily. In making these changes, Facebook isn’t actually looking at the content from these links, according to Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP in charge of News Feed. Facebook has determined statistically that the correlation between these types of users and deceptive content is strong enough that they doen’t have to scrutinize each document.
Most Publishers Won’t Be Affected
Facebook says only about 0.1% of people who share more than 50 posts a day would be affected by this latest update. It seems like only weeding out .1% of the Facebook community that incessantly post every day is not really going to make that much impact? Facebook has made it clear this new update will only affect links shared by those detected as possible spammers, but not their photos.
