Facebook downs low quality links, to display only informative links

A Vice President at Facebook has revealed the social network is making an update to help reduce low quality links in News Feed, saying that “We are always working to improve people’s experience in News Feed by showing more stories that we think people will find informative and entertaining.

Facebook VP News Feed, Adam Mosseri, revealed this yesterday in a blog post saying research carried out on the platform shows that there is a tiny group of people who routinely share vast amounts of public posts every day, effectively spamming people’s feeds.

“Our research further shows that the links they share tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation.

“As a result, we want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritize the links they share more frequently than regular sharers.

“Of course, this is only one signal among many others that may affect the ranking prioritization of this type of post,” said Mosseri.

The Facebook boss says this update will only apply to links, such as an individual article, not to domains, Pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates.

“One of our core News Feed values is that News Feed should be informative.

“By taking steps like this to improve News Feed, we’re able to surface more stories that people find informative and reduce the spread of problematic links such as clickbait, sensationalism and misinformation,” the VP further stated.

“Most publishers won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed,” the VP said, adding: “Publishers that get meaningful distribution from people who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day may see a reduction in the distribution of those specific links”.

Mosseri, however, said, publishers that keep clean would continue see their posts reach their audiences.