Although Facebook has guidelines about what kind of content it removes from its platform, information around the nature of content that is demoted has been a bit unclear up until now. Today, the company has provided more context about the content that faces reduced distribution due to a variety of factors.
This has been detailed in Facebook"s newly-published Content Distribution Guidelines which demote content based on three principles. The first is direct feedback from users, according to which the News Feed is altered to reduce the visibility of questionable content. Areas covered by this principle include:
- Ad farms
- Click-bait links
- Comments that are likely to be reported or hidden
- Engagement-bait
- Links to suspected cloaking domains
- Links to websites requesting unnecessary user data
- Low quality browsing experiences
- Low quality comments
- Low quality events
- Low quality videos
- Pages predicted to be spam
- Sensationalist health content and commercial health posts
The second principle deals with incentivizing content creators to create engaging material. Under this, the following categories are not welcome:
- Domains with limited original content
- Fact-checked misinformation
- Inauthentic sharing
- Links to domains and pages with high "click-gap"
- News articles lacking transparent authorship
- Posts from broadly untrusted news publishers
- Posts from pages that artificially inflate their distribution
- Posts from people who hypershare into groups
- Unoriginal news articles
Finally, we have content that is problematic for community safety, intentionally or unintentionally. This includes:
- Content borderline to the community standards
- Content likely violating our community standards
- Content posted by repeat violators of our policies
- Links to landing pages containing sexual and/or shocking content
- Posts from people who likely have multiple accounts
- Posts that indicate suspicious virality
- Unsafe reporting about suicide
Facebook has stated that these new Content Distribution Guidelines have already come into effect. The company will continue updating these principles as the landscape evolves.