HYDERABAD: Facebook will no longer be encouraging people and pages that beg for likes, comments and shares. Henceforth, posts like “share this picture with your friends”, “like if you love the smell of rain” and “tag a friend who likes coffee” will not be displayed in users’ news feed. This method of promoting posts on Facebook is known as engagement bait.
The change comes days after a research noted that even ten minutes of scrolling through Facebook’s feed could spoil the mood of users.
“Starting this week, we will begin demoting individual posts from people and pages that use the engagement bait. To help us foster more authentic engagement, Facebook has categorised hundreds of thousands of posts to inform a machine learning model that can detect different types of engagement baits,” the company said in a statement.
Mr A. Rajiv, who handles social media account of an entertainment channel, said, “This move is really good as it promotes authentic information. Often posts from our channel get lost among the spams. Because of the likes and shares, there is no longer privacy left and fake information is being circulated heavily. Sometimes people are obligated to share pictures of gods, which will reduce now.”
The company said that posts on missing children, raising money for a cause, or asking for suggestions will not be curbed with the crackdown.
The social media giant will conduct a massive crackdown on pages that use the engagement bait to artificially gain the reach. The ball will be set rolling slowly for page-level demotion so that publishers have the time to adapt to the new norm.
