Facebook Cracks Down on News Feed 'Click-Bait'

Facebook has announced it plans to get rid of "spammy" posts and "click-bait" headlines that appear on people's news feeds through new improvements to its service.

The social network said in a recent blogpost that the move to crack down on such activity came after a proliferation of headlines appeared on news feeds that enticed readers to click to external links by teasing information.

"Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which mean that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed," the post read.

"However, when we asked people in an initial survey what type of content they preferred to see in their news feeds, 80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through.

"Over time, stories with click-bait headlines can drown out content from friends and pages that people really care about."

In order to counteract this, Facebook will be adapting its algorithms so links that cause people to click away to an external site for a short amount of time will not be prioritised in people's news feeds.

Last week, Facebook also announced it would be introducing a new feature that it hopes will prevent users from getting confused by satirical news stories.

Fake news stories from websites such as The Onion in the US and the Daily Mash in the UK were apparently fooling users into believing they were real. As a result, the world's largest social network received feedback "that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others".

A spokesperson for Facebook said in a statement: "We are running a small test which shows the text '[Satire]' in front of links to satirical articles in the related articles unit in News Feed."