Facebook fighting clickbait

My news feed was polluted with clickbait, but what Facebook did to combat it made my jaw drop!

My solution this far was just to ignore any bait on principle.
 
After reading this article my face melted! What happened next will leave you astounded!
 
Facebook to suppress clickbait stories

Facebook has intensified its crackdown on so-called clickbait news that appears on the social network.
Clickbait articles tend to carry intriguing headlines which suggest there is more to the story than there actually is.
They are famous for employing alluring phrases such as "you'll never guess what happened next" in order to drive web traffic.

Facebook says it can now automatically suppress these stories.
It says it has built a technology that scans for tell-tale signs of clickbait headlines on its news feed section - phrases such as "you'll never guess why" and "his response was priceless".

This scanning technology was created by a team at Facebook who manually reviewed "thousands of headlines" to put together a list of commonly identifiable clickbait traits.

Article
 
Clickbait: The changing face of online journalism

It is a golden rule of journalism, taught to any news reporter at the beginning of their career - your introduction should grab the reader straight away.

If you cannot hold someone's attention for a sentence, you have no hope of getting them to read the rest of your article.
The same is true for headlines; stark, witty or intriguing ones can draw the reader's eye to a story.
Headline writing has long been considered a skill but, in the digital age, a new word has become synonymous with online journalism - clickbait.

Put simply, it is a headline which tempts the reader to click on the link to the story. But the name is used pejoratively to describe headlines which are sensationalised, turn out to be adverts or are simply misleading.
Publishers increasingly use it for simple economics; the more clicks you get, the more people on your site, the more you can charge for advertising.

A report by the Columbia Journalism Review highlighted the case of online magazine Slant, which pays writers $100 per month, plus $5 for every 500 clicks on their stories.

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