Facebook targets individual spammers with latest news feed tweak

Facebook is getting more tactical in its war against spammy links invading people’s news feeds. After pinpointing individual spammy links, it is now going after individual users who post the most spammy links.

Facebook has noticed that “a tiny group of people on Facebook” regularly and publicly post a lot of links to spammy pages, like clickbait articles and fake news stories. Now it is going to reduce the reach of those individual’s posts in people’s news feeds, as well as the links they share more frequently than the average person, the company announced on Friday.

Facebook’s move will only apply to the links to individual articles shared by these targeted accounts and will not affect entire domains, Pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates posted by those accounts, according to a Facebook blog post announcing the news.

“Most publishers won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed,” according to Facebook’s blog post.

The publishers that would be affected are the ones who get a lot of traffic from these accounts that Facebook has identified as spammers. In the case of those publishers, articles linked to by the spammers “may see a reduction” in reach on Facebook, according to the company.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.