Facebook has announced that it is going to start targeting and demoting individual posts from people and Pages which create engagement bait posts, those which try and get you to engage by leaving likes, shares, or comments. The tactic uses Facebook’s News Feed algorithm in a way to boost the reach of the post. The social networking company has launched the attack claiming that people don’t want to see these “spammy posts”.
The company will deploy machine learning in order to filter out engagement bait posts, it said:
“To help us foster more authentic engagement, teams at Facebook have reviewed and categorised hundreds of thousands of posts to inform a machine learning model that can detect different types of engagement bait. Posts that use this tactic will be shown less in News Feed.”
Facebook will bring the whip down harder on Pages that repeatedly make these sorts of posts. Page-level demotion will be rolled out in the next several weeks in order to give publishers time to stop using the tactic. Those pages which post authentic content which needs sharing, for example, from local police departments seeking missing persons, will not be affected by the update to the algorithm.
Source: Facebook