Facebook said it will begin to penalize page owners and users who ask for user engagement to gain wide visibility on December 18. Page owners and people whose posts begs users to tag people, like, comment, or share will be penalized.
The incentives, such as “Share with friends to win a free trip”, “Share if you agree”, or “Comment Yes or No”, help in gaining wider reach to page owners or authors as interaction grow.
The new News Feed algorithm would demote the posts or pages adopting engagement bait strategies. The new algorithm will be rolled out in couple of weeks, with which the total reach of all the posts by author or page would reduce.
This is an attempt by Facebook to make engagement baiters to earn their audience through good behavior and roll better content all around. However, the social media giant has made several exceptions. Posts such as missing child report, asking for travel tips, and raising awareness will not be clamped down.
The clampdown is led by a machine learning algorithm that the California-based social media firm said has been provided to “hundreds of thousands of posts” to determine various kinds of engagement bait.
This move would also push out some of the spam type of content which leads to crappy website and may introduce viruses in the machines.
This feature would also help quality content to spread and reduce content which leads to vote, share, and react baiting.