Facebook announced Thursday that it will begin penalizing pages that lure users into liking and sharing their content in its continuing effort to improve the News Feed option.
Facebook is taking action against three kinds of posts, specifically: "Like-baiting" posts that ask for users to share a spam-generating image; "Frequently Circulated Content" which aims to share the same content, multiple times throughout the day; and "Spammy Links" which uses 'deceptive' formatting to trick people into clicking certain posts.
The company stated: "Often these stories claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads."
The Verge pointed out that while some people may argue that the popularity of feed content should be up to the users, Facebook did not always operate this way. The report stated that when 'spammy' photos and too many invites from games appear inside News Feeds, people engage less — even if those photos and invites were generated by friends.
Spam pages are not created by Facebook, but rather by users of Facebook. Because people tend to blame Facebook for the spam, the company is taking action against anyone who uses the social media site to lure users.
"The vast majority of publishers on Facebook are not posting feed spam so they should not be negatively impacted by these changes, and, if anything, may see a very small increase in News Feed distribution," Facebook announced.
