Facebook Looking to Remove Spams with Updated New Feed Algorithm

You will be no stranger to spams if you use your personal mail account on a daily basis. Apparently, it's not only mails that are always affected by Spams, but other services such as News Feeds too. Now with the problem affecting Facebook's own dedicated news service, it seems like the world's most popular social networking site is doing all it can remove this problem.

According to reports, Facebook has now updated it News Feed algorithm to rid the service off spams that affect the existing trending stories that can be attained via the service's feed.

Revealed first via the Official Facebook Newsroom, the post talks about the company's big effort in reducing the spam count. "The goal of News Feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don't miss the stories that are important and relevant to them."

As decided by the company, Facebook will look to target as many as three different kinds of stories, kicking off with those which are "Like-baiting".

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"'Like-baiting' is when a post explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive," the post states.

So basically these are the posts which ask users to like something in return for a gift or a giveaway, or even for some plain social reasons. The idea here is to trick the users into sharing and liking the post, even though normally the user wouldn't have really cared about it in the first place.

Now, keeping that in mind, the company is making improvements to better detect these stories and help in ensuring "that they are not shown more prominently in News Feed than more relevant stories from friends and other Pages."

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Facebook also says that this update will not have any effects on Pages "that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion among their fans, and focuses initially on Pages that frequently post explicitly asking for Likes, Comments and Shares."

Apart from that, the company also discusses a bit or two about spammy links. Spammy Links are those where a post uses inaccurate language or formatting to try and trick people into clicking through to a website that contains only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads.

With the new update in place, the company is now able to better detect spammy links with the update also improving News Feed to reduce cases of these spammy link.