Blog

Facebook Takes Steps to Limit Links to Low Quality Web Pages

A recent string of updates to Facebook have all focused on increasing the quality of the content which is shown on Facebook while getting rid of misinformation. Facebook’s newest update focuses more specifically on identifying links to low quality web pages that will provide a poor user experience. Posts that have links like this will be pushed further down the new feed so that users will be less likely to click on them.

Facebook’s strike against websites like this has come about after seeing how many users were disappointed or annoyed when they clicked on links on their news feed which then led them to a website filled with more ads and pop ups than actual content. As a result, Facebook has been working to protect their platform and their users by using tools that will prevent these links from showing up as high in a news feed.

To identify these different sites, Facebook says that it looked at hundreds of thousands of web pages that had poor quality landing pages to determine what these kinds of websites had in common. They were then able to train an artificial intelligence program to identify these sites. The goal is to limit poor quality ad filled sites from getting traffic from Facebook and to save users from following links to these sites.

If Facebook is able to limit links to poor quality and click bait news sites, they’ll be able to create a social media platform that is free from many of the things that routinely annoy users. Their actions to restrict these kinds of links from showing up high in the news feed will likely cause websites linked to Facebook that are higher quality to have a slight increase in traffic while ones that are low quality will experience a drop off in traffic.