Facebook has been receiving reports from users regarding spam posts that provoke them annoyingly for liking, share, and comment. The tactic is known as ‘engagement bait’ and utilizes the News Feed algorithm to gain more reach. The social media platform is taking action against it starting this week.
From now, Facebook will start ‘demoting individual posts from people and Pages that use engagement bait.’ This leads the platform to provide a more authentic makeover in terms of the engagement of users.
Facebook has ‘reviewed and categorized hundreds of thousands of posts’ for a machine learning model to detect various kinds of engagement bait. The idea is to reduce the number of such posts as much as possible from the News Feed.
That’s not all, as Facebook in coming weeks will bring stricter demotions for the Pages that use the tactic systematically and repeatedly. This will be carried out in a few weeks, giving publishers an opening to adapt accordingly and be more aware of not using the tactic even for once.
There are many important contents for users to check on, like circulating a missing child report or raising money for a cause. The initiative will not affect these posts, as said by Facebook in a blog post. The targets are only those which violate the News Feed values such as authenticity.
This is nothing new from the social media giant, as it is recently continuing with its initiatives like demoting clickbait headlines and links that encourage low-quality web page experiences.
The blog post concludes with quite a strict and straightforward tone: “Publishers and other businesses that use engagement bait tactics in their posts should expect their reach on these posts to decrease. Meanwhile, Pages that repeatedly share engagement bait posts will see more significant drops in reach. Page Admins should continue to focus on posting relevant and meaningful stories that do not use engagement bait tactics.”
You can know more about how to avoid using the engagement bait by clicking here
