Facebook Says 'No To ClickBaits,' National Union of Journalists Agrees

Facebook plans to change its current news feed algorithm to produce more straightforward headlines from publishers to keep its 1.71 billion members stay. Reportedly, users are getting discouraged by some Clickbait news stories, as classified by Facebook, that have withhold or distort information.

Facebook's vice president Adam Mosseri, product management for the news feed, revealed in an interview that they wanted all publishers to post contents that people actually care about. He also said that much more straightforward news stories are what users are after recently.

Facebook has been constantly working for its integrity to keep users happy. The news feed algorithm change aims to make users spend longer time on Facebook. In 2014, some of the Facebook's clickbait calculations that focused on spam like articles will be limited.  They will now consider how long a user spends reading an article after it was clicked. 

As a result, Facebook has been able to dictate the terms in which it engages with publishers, which now has fewer options for their articles' distribution. Publishers that have clickbait like headlines and have lower ranks due to the algorithm change will have the opportunity to change their content and presentation of headlines. This startegy will reportedly enhance the social platform's relationships with publishers by being more transparent on its news feed practices. 

Facebook researchers Alex Peysakhovich and Kristin Hendrix, on the other hand, have explained the algorithm change. According to them, they only fight obvious clickbaits and block content from the platform's news feeds, based on words or expressions, Bloomberg reported.

Clickbait articles tend to have misleading headlines that attract readers believing that there is more to the story than there actually is. This is what led the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) accept the decision. The chairman of the NUJ Trinity Mirror group chapel Martin Shipton recently claimed that the culture of clickbait and setting traffic targets will not let reporters produce better stories for a more challenging journalism, BBC reported.