11/04/2019
Click-gap is coming and it will affect more than just the newsfeed. Challenge accepted! 🤓
📢 Facebook is changing the News Feed algorithms ... again!! The company just announced a slew of updates aimed at promoting more trustworthy news sources and stopping the spread of 'problematic' content.
By far the biggest change to come from these announcements is the introduction of a NEW metric called Click-Gap. Facebook's News Feed algorithms will use this new metric to determine how to rank certain posts.
👉🏻 These changes may affect your groups and business pages. Here is a summary of the most prominent changes in plain English:
🔵 FACEBOOK'S NEWEST NEWS FEED METRIC: CLICK-GAP
This new metric is Facebook's attempt to spot websites that are disproportionately popular on Facebook compared with the rest of the web. In other words, a piece of content on Facebook with a link to a website that appears to be 'going viral' but only inside of Facebook and is not that popular outside of Facebook.
Unusual popularity of a site can be a sign that the domain is succeeding on News Feed in a way that doesn't reflect the authority they've built outside it and is producing low-quality content.
Click-Gap could be bad news for fringe sites that optimize their content to go viral on Facebook.
Facebook’s Click-Gap metric is a new spin on Google's Page Rank concept, using links to assess whether Facebook is an accurate reflection of the internet at large.
[Starting April 10, 2019, globally.]
🔵 GROUPS
1. Facebook will limit the reach in News Feed of groups that repeatedly share content that has been rated false by independent fact-checkers. [Starting April 10, 2019, globally.]
2. Facebook will hold group admins more accountable for Community Standards violations. Admin and moderator content violations, including member posts they have approved, will be used as a stronger signal that the group violates Facebook's standards and the group runs a higher risk of being taken down. [Starting in the coming weeks, globally.]
For most bona-fide group owners that run meaningful groups, these two changes above shouldn't affect you at all. However, there is already a rumor doing the rounds that Facebook is lowering the reach of group posts across the board, especially if your group is linked to your page. Per my recent posts on my page here, this rumor has been debunked; it is simply not true. Do not unlink your groups from your page. With these new News Feed changes, though, just be that bit more vigilant about low-quality link posts in your group. The Context Button and Trust Indicator should help give peace of mind. (The little "i" icon that appears on link posts.)
3. People will soon be able to remove their posts and comments from a group after they leave the group. You'll have this ability even if you are no longer a member of the group. [Starting soon, globally.]
This change will be a welcome relief to many Facebook users, I'm sure!
🔵 MESSENGER
1. Facebook is bringing the Verified Badge from Facebook into Messenger to help avoid scammers that pretend to be high-profile people. [Starting this week, globally.]
Most likely the blue or gray check badges will simple port over from Facebook personal profiles and public pages that already have the badges. No doubt, a ton of people/accounts will want to apply for Messenger verification, but it's not clear yet whether Facebook will provide a new way to apply for a Verified Badge in Messenger or not.
🔵 INSTAGRAM
The company has begun reducing the spread of posts that are vaguely 'inappropriate' but do not go against Instagram's Community Guidelines. These posts will still appear in Instagram's feed if you follow that account, but the content may not appear in Explore or hashtag pages. The example Facebook gives is a 'sexually suggestive' post.
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📰 From the Washington Post:
How Facebook is trying to stop its own algorithms from doing their job
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/10/how-facebook-is-trying-stop-its-own-algorithms-doing-their-job/
"The question is whether these changes are tweaks on the margins or more fundamental fixes to a service that--while massively profitable--has experienced a precipitous loss of public trust. The newsfeed algorithm alone takes in hundreds of thousands of behavioral signals when it evaluates which posts get promotion — and it’s tough to assess the impact any single fix might have on such a complex system."
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Facebook announced more than a dozen updates that aim to promote more trustworthy news sources, tamp down on Groups that spread misinformation, and give the public more insight into how Facebook crafts its content policies. To promote these various efforts, Facebook held a four-hour long event at its Menlo Park headquarters for around 20 reporters where employees recapped changes and answered questions.
📰 FURTHER READING
🔵 Facebook's official announcement:
Remove, Reduce, Inform: New Steps to Manage Problematic Content
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/04/remove-reduce-inform-new-steps/
🔹 Wired:
Facebook Is Changing News Feed (Again) To Stop Fake News
https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-click-gap-news-feed-changes/
🔹 Techcrunch:
Instagram now demotes vaguely ‘inappropriate’ content
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/10/instagram-borderline/
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Your thoughts? Are all these changes giant leaps forward in the Facebook ecosystem for the betterment of all? Or, are they retroactive measures in an attempt to appease governments and other bodies, as well as chip away at getting public/user trust moving upward? Hm. Hm. 🤔
