Facebook introduces more steps to tackle like-farming posts

Facebook’s latest attempt to reduce clickbait appearing in your newsfeed sees the social networking site threaten to reduce visibility for Facebook pages that engage in “engagement baiting”.

What is engagement baiting?

It’s similar to clickbait, which would bait Facebook users into clicking a link, by using misleading or exaggerated headlines.

Only instead of a click, the offender is trying to lure Facebook users into engaging with a post (i.e. a like, share or comment.) Such engagement helps a post spread across the Facebook platform.

Now, if you’re thinking that sounds awfully similar to like-farming, then you’re right. It is. Some examples of Facebook engagement baiting, provided by Facebook, can be seen below.

Now if you’re wondering if engagement baiting and like-farming are the exact same thing, then that depends on your definitions. Generally we define like-farming as baiting engagement through deception or exploitation. In which case, engagement-baiting is a broader definition to include any Facebook post that implores readers to engage with it, regardless of whether it deceives or exploits.

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As such, this should mean a crackdown on like-farming posts that ask you to – for example – like and share a post to win a Range Rover. Or those annoying posts to type “Amen” on a photo. It can also crackdown on tacky posts that – for example – ask you to “vote” by reacting on a post in a certain way, or by imploring users to tag their friends in a particular post.

Essentially, those annoying posts that circulate Facebook every day.

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Pages that publish such posts will see their posts reach reduced, and serial offenders will see the reach of their entire page reduced. The same applies to individual users.

From Facebook –

Additionally, over the coming weeks, we will begin implementing stricter demotions for Pages that systematically and repeatedly use engagement bait to artificially gain reach in News Feed. We will roll out this Page-level demotion over the course of several weeks to give publishers time to adapt and avoid inadvertently using engagement bait in their posts. Moving forward, we will continue to find ways to improve and scale our efforts to reduce engagement bait.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has tried to limit the number of spammy or tacky posts appearing in their user’s newsfeeds, so far with minimal success. We wait with ‘baited’ (pun intended) breath to see how this new development turns out.

Now, if only we can get Facebook to start cracking down on those now-completely-unoriginal memes of a list of boys or girls names, then maybe we’re getting somewhere.