Facebook is Cracking Down on Clickbait Again

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Clickbait is the bane of the internet's existence. You could be looking at news and then you'll see a ridiculous looking article that you know will be incorrect at worst and unrelated at best but still some people continue to click on them. On news sites, you know that these articles are definitely clickbait but on social media, you can't always be too sure. Some pages are dedicated to sharing clickbait though and now Facebook is planning on dealing with them.

This isn't the first time Facebook have cracked down on clickbait but this time, they have put something in place that would punish the users. Facebook have sorted through all the headlines they can on Facebook and have categorised them as either clickbait or not clickbait. The clickbait has been used to create software that studies new articles and analyses which pages post it the most. Pages will then get a score and the less clickbait they share, the better it will be. If a page has a high clickbait score then the algorithm will cut the page's organic reach. This means that users will be less likely to see the page's posts.

Hopefully, this will mean that we should see less clickbait but it won't stop us from seeing it completely. This only stops pages from sharing clickbait and not users. If someone shares it once or twice by accident then you don't mind but there are also users who seem to post nothing else. It's not been stated whether this crackdown will eventually work with links shared by users too. Even if not this should put some users off sharing it. If you don't get ranked high on people's Facebook feeds, then the only way they'll see your posts if they go on your page. Fewer people are going to think to do that if they can't see you in their feed anyway.

Unfortunately, some businesses feel they need to share clickbait to get attention for their other work. Draw people in with clickbait and convince them to stay for the other stories. This is pretty common practice but this crackdown means they will be punished. That seems slightly unfair but clickbait is spam and is a nuisance. So next time you see something you think is clickbait, don't share it.