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Facebook Takes Added Measures To Combat Spam
4 Jul, 2017 / 10:22 AM / Reem Ibrahim

Source: https://www.mediapost.com

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From your unbearably political uncle to that friend who won’t let up about vaccines, spam can take many forms. Whatever shape it takes, Facebook is stepping up efforts to sideline spam in users’ News Feeds.

Among its nearly 2 billion active members, the tech titan has identified a small group of troublemakers who regularly share massive amounts of public posts per day.

These uses are “effectively spamming people’s feeds,” Adam Mosseri, a News Feed VP at Facebook, notes in a new blog post.

Mosseri and his colleagues have found the links shared by these “spammers” tend to include low-quality content, such as clickbait, “sensationalism” and misinformation.

“As a result, we want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritize the links they share more frequently than regular sharers,” according to Mosseri.

This is only one move, among many, that may affect the ranking prioritization of this type of post, he points out. “This update will only apply to links, such as an individual article, not to domains, Pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates.”

More broadly, Mosseri said he and his team are determined to ensure the content shared in users’ News Feeds is increasingly informative, rather than sensational and misleading.

For Facebook, the update is part of an all-out war on bad actors and their efforts to flood the platform with spam, phishing expeditions, “false news” and other unwanted fare.

To that end, Facebook recently released a broad plan to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform.

More recently, Facebook began rolling out a platform update designed to expose users to fewer posts and ads connected to low-quality web pages.