Cracking down on stories with misleading headlines, Facebook announced that it was fine-tuning its efforts to undermine clickbait on Facebook users' News Feeds. In a blog post, Facebook said that it was doing this to improve the quality of stories that appear on Facebook users' feeds. Facebook intensifying efforts to weed out unreliable content from its platform is a part of a larger effort that the social media giant decided to embark on following criticism that 'fake news' on Facebook contributed to Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out the principles for this effort in a Facebook note titled "Building Global Community". How Facebook is reining clickbait in In an August 2016 post, Facebook said that it categorizes clickbait on two criteria: (1) if the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is; and (2) if the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader. For example, the headline “You’ll Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet…” withholds information required to understand the article (What happened? Who Tripped?) The headline “Apples Are Actually Bad For You?!” misleads the reader (apples are only bad for you if you eat too many every day). The company identified commonly used phrases in such stories, and worked to reduce their ranking in the news feed, so they would appear well below other posts. This week, Facebook said that they would now be detecting such stories on an…
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