Facebook to start purging fake, click-bait videos from News Feed

Facebook’s algorithm is so blatantly over-promoting videos that people are now gaming it to go viral with static memes uploaded as MP4s lmao pic.twitter.com/fUTdvzKtgk

— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) July 5, 2017

Facebook users often encounter those annoying fake videos—often static images disguised as mp4 files to create more traction online.

The social network is finally doing something about it, tweaking its algorithm to make such content become less visible to its users.

According to The Verge, Facebook’s upcoming update will put an end to such click-bait posts with fake video play buttons embedded as an image, as well as videos of static images.

Following Facebook’s push of promoting longer video content on people’s news feeds, spammers began exploiting the boost by creating misleading contents for their own gain.

Some clickbait posts and static memes even laid out links to low-quality websites with malicious ads, by disguising itself as 10-second clips.

“Publishers that rely on these intentionally deceptive practices should expect the distribution of those clickbait stories to markedly decrease,” Facebook engineers Baraa Hamodi, Zahir Bokhari and Yun Zhang wrote in a blog post. “Most Pages won’t see significant changes to their distribution in News Feed.”

The much-needed update is expected to slowly roll out in the coming weeks, with more and more clickbait posts getting flagged down by the minute.  Khristian Ibarrola /ra