If you are anything like me you’ll be sick of seeing clickbait articles popping up on your facebook newsfeed.  “Clickbait” is used by advertisers to make you like an article or service before seeing the content, so for example you’ll get something like :

You’ll never guess what these A List Celebs got up to last night

or

Watch this video, you’ll never guess what happened next…

Once you then click on the link you’ll then be requested to like a page or submit your email address before continuing.  We’ve even seen adverts for gadgets and apparel retailers who won’t let customers continue until they sign up to an account.  In research most people spend a very short time on these spam sites before returning to their main facebook page.

Facebook are now planning to crack down on clickbait with two new updates to their social media engine.  Facebook now intend to watch how posts are interacted with by users.  Facebook recently said the following in their online newsroom : “Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.

“However, when we asked people in an initial survey what type of content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through.”

Another plan is to gave greater weight to articles that contain a link format rather than articles where the link is inserted into a photographs caption.

We hope this will also herald the end of the enormously untrustworthy like and share competitions that smaller commercial users employ.