Facebook announces click-bait crackdown

Social media giant Facebook has been cracking down on click-bait headlines on articles as part of a major update it is rolling out.

In a statement, Facebook product specialist Joyce Tang and research scientist Khalid El-Arini explained the technique will involve Facebook measuring how long its users aren’t on its website.

“One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook… If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted,” El-Arini and Tang said.

“With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.”

Alongside the click-bait headline crackdown, Facebook said it will prioritise posts shared as links rather than as captions on photos or in status update posts.

The social media giant claims the change is designed to encourage users to choose the type of post that best reflects the content they want to share, and that its link format is the best option for sharing links.