Greg's Corner

Facebook to clamp down on clickbait

Facebook just became a little less annoying. No, they haven’t stopped your relatives from saying wildly inappropriate things. No, they haven’t stopped your friend from going on their latest ill-informed political diatribe. What they have done is to limit the amount of clickbait in your news feed. While you may not know the term ‘clickbait’ you’ve definitely seen it on Facebook. They’re the articles that have phrases in their headlines like “You won’t believe what happens next” or “This will shock you”. In a nutshell clickbait is any article that purposely withholds information in order to get you to click on the link.

Entire websites have been built around Facebook clickbait and now they’ll have to rethink their strategies in order to get views from the social media giant. Hopefully their new strategy will be to write engaging content but I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for it. Shady publishers and content mills will always be looking for the next way to try to fool Facebook users to click on the web content version of fast food and your friends and family will continue to clog your news feed with them.