Facebook has started demoting some posts, here’s why

Facebook has lately been taking several steps to clean up user’s News Feed and curbing fake news. It has also been working on bringing down the number of spam posts on the users’ timeline. In order to do this, the social media giant has this time announced it will be demoting engagement bait posts on its platform.

The social networking giant said that this will include posts coming both from people as well as pages. “People have told us that they dislike spammy posts on Facebook that goad them into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions. For example, “LIKE this if you’re an Aries!” This tactic, known as “engagement bait,” seeks to take advantage of our News Feed algorithm by boosting engagement in order to get greater reach. So, starting this week, we will begin demoting individual posts from people and Pages that use engagement bait,” said Henry Silverman, operations integrity specialist at Facebook.
To make this happen, team at Facebook has reviewed ‘hundreds of thousands’ of posts to help create a machine learning process. Posts using these engagement baits will be shown less in the News Feed.

This is not all though. Silverman adds that in the coming weeks, the company will be making the process stricter for pages that repeatedly use engagement baits. “We will roll out this Page-level demotion over the course of several weeks to give publishers time to adapt and avoid inadvertently using engagement bait in their posts,” he said.

However there are certain posts that won’t be affected by this change. Posts that ask people for advice or help, such as circulating a missing child report and similar posts won’t be impacted.

Facebook recently introduced a new ‘Snooze’ feature that lets to temporarily unfollow a person, page or a group for 30 days. The feature aims to give users better control over their News Feed and notifications alerts.