Facebook Unveils Another News Feed Change To Fight Spam

no spam allow illustration designFacebook’s News Feed feature is a great way to stay connected and engage with your friends. However, the more spam content that floods your feed, the less likely you’ll be to keep coming back. That’s why Facebook unveiled another change to its algorithm this week that will shove content from spammy users so far down your feed that you may never see it.

“There is a tiny group of people on Facebook who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day, effectively spamming people’s feeds,” Facebook VP Adam Mossen wrote in a blog post announcing the change. “The links they share tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation… we want to reduce the influence of these spammers.”

Indeed, Facebook can’t outright ban users from posting dozens of times a day; after all, that would fly in the face of the site’s mission to be an open and inclusive platform that promotes sharing. However, it is well within the platform’s power to de-emphasize content to the point where it’s hardly able to be seen at all.

This seems like a minor tweak, but with a platform as large and powerful as Facebook, even small changes can go a long way toward fighting the spread of spam and malware.