Facebook Cracking Down On Video Clickbait In The Newsfeed

If you’ve ever clicked on what looks like an interesting video promising “17 Ways You’re Eating Cheese Wrong,” only to find yourself on a spammy website that has nothing to do with cheese, you know how frustrating such clickbait can be. Facebook is now introducing new updates aimed at keeping those deceptive posts out of your news feed.

There are two kinds of video clickbait Facebook is going after: Stories that feature either fake video play buttons embedded in their imagery, or videos that only play a static image.

“People want to see accurate information on Facebook, and so do we,” Facebook engineers Baraa Hamodi, Zahir Bokhari, and Yun Zhang note in a blog post.

To that end, the social media network will begin demoting stories that feature feature fake video play buttons and static images disguised as videos in news feeds.

“Authentic communication is one of our core News Feed values, and we know our community values it,” the company says.

And if you’ve got a page that relies on these “intentionally deceptive practices,” Facebook notes that you “should expect the distribution of those clickbait stories to markedly decrease.”

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