Facebook Downgrades Spam Site Ranks, Huge Help In Fighting Fake News

The internet can be a nasty, dank cesspool of a pit thanks to websites that exist for the sole purpose of making money off of the misery of others. Such websites have made a home for themselves on Facebook, where unsuspecting users are led to sites that have junk ads and offer nothing of substance. The social media site has had enough, apparently, and is set on punishing such websites.

Facebook made the announcement via post with the title “Reducing Links to Low-Quality Web Page Experiences.” The gist of it involves tagging all links or posts from websites where, upon landing on the pages themselves, users only get useless content and get bombarded with disruptive ads.

“With this update, we reviewed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads,” the Facebook post reads. “We then used artificial intelligence to understand whether new web pages shared on Facebook have similar characteristics. So if we determine a post might link to these types of low-quality web pages, it may show up lower in people’s feeds and may not be eligible to be an ad. This way people can see fewer misleading posts and more informative posts.”

It would appear that the decision to make these changes came after Facebook conducted a survey, which was meant to isolate the most disruptive factors in users’ News Feeds. Facebook’s News Feeds product manager Greg Marra told Tech Crunch as much, saying that the update is meant to target sites that are particularly spammy.

What really makes this story great news for the internet is the impact it would have on fake news sites. Since such websites don’t typically have wholesome ads and offer practically no content of substance, Facebook just made publications peddling fraudulent information less relevant.