Facebook Employs Spam Filter As New Weapon In War Against Clickbait

Facebook has been on the warpath against sites that use clickbait headlines in order to get traffic, and its new weapon uses the same method as an email spam filter. It basically takes certain words and phrases that are commonly used in headlines that have nothing to do with or omits certain parts of the actual content, and then uses them to identify which headline is legitimate and which is clickbait trash.

Facebook has assigned a team of its employees to analyze thousands of headlines in order to identify the common words and phrases that are considered clickbait, Ars Technica reports. Since the social network can’t assign enough people to actually slog through the tens of thousands of articles that go through the site every day, Facebook will instead use the words and phrases that clickbait headlines commonly use to filter them out.

The new update to the social network’s news feed won’t completely prevent clickbait headlines from showing up, but sites that use this kind of tactic will go lower in the rankings. This means that they won’t show up as frequently, which then drastically reduces the traffic that they are getting.

Just to drive the point home, the quantity of clickbait headlines used by a site directly impacts that site’s rankings, Slate points out. The more a publisher focuses on catchy words instead of actual substance, the lower its ranking will be and the less traffic it will get.

On a blog post, Facebook explained that the update was a response to the request of users to reduce the frequency of click bait showing up on their newsfeeds, citing headlines like “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!” and “The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless” as clear examples of the questionable practice.

Such is the power of Facebook in influencing traffic to news websites that in response, some publishers were forced to change some of their headlines in order to avoid getting penalized.