Facebook to crack down on dubious ads and posts

Facebook yesterday announced its latest move to cut sensationalist, misleading, and spammy junk from its content.

According to the company, it had tweaked its News Feed algorithms to downrank ''low-quality webpage experiences,'' as part of its heightened effort to crack down on fake news, viral clickbait, and other types of content posted on the social network purely for the financial benefit of third-party website owners.

The company added that the changes would be rolled out to users over the next few months.

This News Feed tweak extended to both ads users might see on the platform and posts and links dropped in manually from pages and users.

''We have had a policy in place since last year to prevent advertisers with low-quality webpage experiences from advertising on our platform,'' write Facebook researchers Jiun-Ren Lin and Shengbo Guo. ''Now, we are increasing enforcement on ads and also taking into account organic posts in News Feed.''

Facebook said it had built up a database of hundreds of thousands of webpages linked on its site and mobile app that ''contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.''

Researchers used artificial intelligence to scan new links shared on Facebook that matched the earlier criteria it used, including the ratio of content to ads and whether the website contained adult or shocking content as per Facebook's guidelines and standards.

According to commentators, with the change, Facebook will be able to fight fake news, as fakers were often financially motivated and blanketed their false information articles in ads.

High-quality sites might see referral traffic increase, while dubious sites could see traffic decline as the update rolled out gradually over the coming months, they say.

According to Facebook product manager for News Feed, Greg Marra who spoke to Josh Constine of Tech Crunch, the decision was taken based on surveys of users about what disturbed their News Feed experience.

One pain point users commonly cited was links that pushed them to ''misleading, sensational, spammy, or otherwise low-quality experiences . . .[including] sexual content, shocking content, and other things that are going to be really disruptive.''