Facebook Makes Changes To News Feed To Combat Spam

[engine]

Facebook is making some changes to it's news feed to reduce the spam, or unwanted stories from pages that people don't want in the feed.
Facebook Makes Changes To News Feed To Combat Spam [newsroom.fb.com]

Like-baiting
“Like-baiting” is when a post explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive.

The improvement we are making today better detects these stories and helps ensure that they are not shown more prominently in News Feed than more relevant stories from friends and other Pages. This update will not impact Pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, and focuses initially on Pages that frequently post explicitly asking for Likes, Comments and Shares.

Frequently Circulated Content
People and Pages on Facebook frequently reshare great content, but people tell us there are occasionally instances where photos or videos are uploaded to Facebook over and over again. We’ve found that people tend to find these instances of repeated content less relevant, and are more likely to complain about the Pages that frequently post them. We are improving News Feed to de-emphasize these Pages, and our early testing shows that this change causes people to hide 10% fewer stories from Pages overall.

Spammy Links
By measuring how frequently people on Facebook who visit a link choose to like the original post or share that post with their friends, we’ve been able to better detect spammy links. The update we are making today improves News Feed to reduce cases of these spammy links, and in our early testing we’ve seen a 5% increase in people on Facebook clicking on links that take them off of Facebook – this is a big increase in the context of News Feed and is a good sign that people are finding the remaining content in their News Feed more relevant and trustworthy.

[KevinC]

so you create an algorithm that uses likes, shares and comments as a way to rank content - now business are going to suffer for asking users to like, share or comment on their content.

Hmm, seems like facebook is taking a page out of googles playbook.

Disguise your intent as "quality control", when in reality you're just pushing businesses to pay for play.

[Stickywebz]

I enjoy seeing things like this. Feeds were getting really bad with spamming and in all honesty we could probably use another adjustment. :)

[sensei]

I think facebook should focus on removing all the bad taste pics that are floating around at the moment.at 6pm tonight i saw pictures in the newsfeed that could have been found on x rated sites. real bad taste marketing ploy especially when the younger audience may see these things too.come on fb clean it up and let the businesses have a fair shot at getting some exposure.