Here is the type of content Facebook demotes on its platform

The Facebook logo with a stop sign background colour scheme

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.