Starting this week, Facebook will double down on removing spammy posts from your timeline. The social networking giant wants to demote “engagement bait” posts that push users to taking actions like tagging, sharing, liking, or commenting. Engagement-bait posts that asks to “tag a friend who love chocolate” are popular because they trick Facebook’s algorithms which leads to the posts showing up on multiple news feeds. Facebook is working to remove that menace. However, posts that ask people for advice, recommendations and help will not be affected by the change.
In order to implement this, Facebook analysed and categorised hundreds of thousands of posts and taught a machine learning model to detect a variety of engagement bait posts.
Facebook will also implement stricter demotions for pages that continue posting engagement-bait posts repeatedly through “significant drops” in reach, although the company has given page admins a few weeks to adapt to the change.
Facebook had earlier tweaked its news feed to tackle clickbait posts and remove fake likes, junk posts and spam comments from posts.