The amount of absolute trash that fills an average Facebook feed these days is pretty outrageous. I can’t scroll for more than five seconds without being hounded to “tag a friend that likes cheese!” or “like if you wan’t to save the dying puppy, ignore if you’re a FUCKING MONSTER”. Give me a goddamn break.
Welp, Facebook has had enough of this shit, too, which is why they’re attempting to clean it up. From this week, the social media platform will demote spammy posts that beg for engagement, whether it’s likes, comments or shares.
Because Facebook’s algorithm prioritises posts with high levels of engagement, this digital shite ends up at the top of your news feed where your mum’s friend Janet has tagged all of her kids because their names showed up on a picture stating they’ll be getting married next year. Classic Janet.
Of course, posts that ask people for help, advice, or recommendations won’t be targeted by the change, so if you’re trying to raise money for charity or just want your mates to recommend you a new book, you’ll be sweet.
To combat the deluge of trashy posts, Facebook reviewed hundreds of thousands of posts and fed them to a machine learning model so it could learn how to identify junk posts and demote them. Pages that continuously fish for engagement after a few weeks will cop stricter demotions.
“Moving forward, we will continue to find ways to improve and scale our efforts to reduce engagement bait,” the company said. “We want to reduce the spread of content that is spammy, sensational, or misleading in order to promote more meaningful and authentic conversations on Facebook.”
I, for one, look forward to not being constantly tagged in the post “@M owes you a Big Mac / beer / puppy / some other shit”.
