Facebook has rolled out updates that amend the way users view articles on its site to remove ‘click bait’, which are articles that lure readers with a catchy headline, while not delivering much more.
The social media major’s latest update is against those who exploit the platform to drive massive traffic to news sites, and those using Facebook algorithm to rank better.
The latest update enables algorithm to consider the time spent by users in reading an article in a bid to judge the importance, while will also study how many users talk about or share an article.
Facebook said in a statement: "Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.
"However, when we asked people in an initial survey what type of content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through."
Further, the algorithm will keep an eye on the number of likes received by a post or shared to decide whether or not it is ‘valuable’ to users.
