Facebook wants to clean up like-baiting and other spam

Facebook vowed Thursday to keep the News Feed cleaner of spam, calling out pages that use like-baiting and other shady techniques to game the algorithm and receive outstanding organic reach.

Many times, passion pages or other types non-business affiliated pages will share an image while begging for likes, comments, and shares — launching the content into more News Feeds. However, Facebook says that this content is, on average, 15 percent less relevant than content with similar vital stats.

So Facebook is taking action against like-baiting posts, as well as content that is repeatedly shown in News Feed and spammy links.

Facebook says this will only punish content that users don’t want to see, not posts from pages that are earnestly trying to gain engagement:

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...

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