Facebook changes its News Feed to crack down on clickbait — again

If there's one constant at Facebook it's that your News Feed will change.

The company is once again adjusting the algorithm that powers News Feed. The changes are (again) aimed at reducing the amount of "clickbait" in users' feeds.

With the changes, which will arrive over the next couple weeks, Facebook is using two key factors to define clickbait (emphasis their own): 

Links from pages that routinely post these types of headlines will be demoted in users' News Feeds, Facebook said.

While these changes are new, clickbait is an issue Facebook has addressed before (and likely will address again). The social network previously made a change that tried to reduce clickbait based on the amount of time people spent reading a given link. If a user clicked on a link but navigated back to Facebook quickly, then the quality of that post was likely lower than those with more time spent, the thinking went.  Read more...