Facebook to Begin Crackdown on Pages that Employ ‘Engagement Baits’

Facebook is clamping down on what it calls ‘engagement bait’; a new type of click bait which features posts asking people to like, share or comment to boost engagement figures.

Users have been inundated with posts in their news feeds like: Like if you think butterflies are beautiful or share to get a pack of candies. This tactics is commonly employed by publishers to game Facebook’s algorithm, which rewards posts that get better engagement and shows them to more people.

The Social media giant has however decided it would no longer tolerate publishers gaming the system this way and claims users don’t like it either.

“People have told us that they dislike spammy posts on Facebook that goad them into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions,” the company wrote on its blog.

Facebook also announced in its blog post that the posts aren’t banned exactly, but starting from Monday, Facebook will now demote those posts in the News Feed. Facebook Pages that repeatedly use these tactics will potentially get all of their posts demoted.

The crackdown won’t be immediate as Facebook is giving publishers time to reconsider their strategies.

“We will roll out this Page-level demotion over the course of several weeks to give publishers time to adapt and avoid inadvertently using engagement bait in their posts,” Facebook said in a blog post.

Facebook also made it clear that posts asking for help, advice or recommendations will not be adversely impacted by the update.

This move is seen as a means to increase the “authenticity” of posts that appear in people’s news feeds. It is the next step up from tackling click-bait articles, the social network said.