Facebook penalises copied content
New policies from the social network will remove copied content, or content that adds no value, from the news feed.
Landing pages with poor-quality ads, clickbait headlines, websites that spread fake news or use content stolen from other sites: all of this should gradually start to disappear from Facebook.
The news was first reported exclusively by TechCrunch. The world's biggest social network confirmed that it is rolling out a project that will show users fewer links that trigger an alert, a warning for content that is not authentic. This new way of ranking posts in the news feed was introduced after surveys and face-to-face interviews with users, who said they hate low-quality content.
The main goal is simple: to create an umbrella effect that improves the authenticity of content on the internet. To do this, the new news feed distribution policy will stop showing stolen intellectual property. That content gets less referral traffic and earns less from advertising, and it serves as an example to anyone else who intends to steal articles, photos and videos.
And in case the data stolen from millions of users in the platform's recent security breach ends up being published, Facebook has already put a security system in place that makes those links disappear from the feed for good.
In TechCrunch's exclusive article, one of the examples given is a website that Facebook could exclude because it copied an article from a news website but packed it with ads, which brought it financial gain.
In an addendum to a post about demoting sites with too many ads, Facebook explains that it has rolled out "...an update so that people see fewer posts from low-quality sites that mostly copy and republish content from other sites without adding authentic value". "We are updating our Publisher Guidelines to reflect this," the social network added. It also confirmed that it will send alerts to news publishers so they add original content or add value to existing content.
So how does Facebook decide that content is not original? The system compares the main text of a web page with other similar content to find potential similarities.
It then uses a classifier that combines this prediction with how sites write clickbait headlines, and adds the quality and quantity of ads on the page. It is a way to make the web more transparent while improving the experience for everyone who has a Facebook profile.
