Home Facebook Learns People Hate Clickbait; You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

Facebook Learns People Hate Clickbait; You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

Three months after Facebook product head Mike Hudack’s infamous rage against the media landscape his company helped create, the world’s largest social network is taking a stand against “clickbait”—stories with misleading, incomplete or sensational headlines that don’t stand up to the actual content. 

“It’s hard to tell who’s to blame,” Hudack wrote on Facebook, the media portal from which one in three Americans gets the news (according to the Pew Research Center). “But someone should fix this sh-t.” 

Facebook to the rescue! 

On Monday, the company announced on its newsroom page that it would now …

… help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant, and to continue to weed out stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and they don’t want to see.

Facebook vs. Clickbait

Will this cure the ills diagnosed by Hudack and suffered by CNN, the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and Vice, all of which Hudack called out by name? What of Ezra Klein and his new website, Vox, for which the Facebook employee reserved his most toxic vitriol?

“Personally I hoped that we would find a new home for serious journalism,” Hudack wrote of Vox. “And instead they write stupid stories about how you should wash your jeans instead of freezing them.”

One wonders how Facebook might actually remedy the clickbait plague. Consider this response to Hudack’s post by The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal, which cites Hudack’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg:

My perception is that Facebook is the major factor in almost every trend you identified. I’m not saying this as a hater, but if you asked most people in media why we do these stories, they’d say, “They work on Facebook.” And your own CEO has even provided an explanation for the phenomenon with his famed quote, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” This is not to say we (the (digital) media) don’t have our own pathologies, but Google and Facebook’s social and algorithmic influence dominate the ecology of our world.

If anything, the clickbait nature of the news Hudack raged against three months ago is rapidly heading toward peak clickbaititude. You don’t need to look any further than the Saved You A Click account on Twitter or The Onion’s recently-launched BuzzFeed satire, Click Hole.

“Saving you from clickbait and adding context since 2014,” according to its Twitter bio, Saved You A Click queers the pitch on countless spammy headlines via cut-to-the-chase retweets that put the answer before the headline. The account’s 148,000 followers testify that the service is much appreciated. 

Click Hole, meanwhile, features content so ridiculous, it’s occasionally indistinguishable from its for-realsies analogue. Some examples:

Facebook, in its anti-clickbait post, says its users don’t care for high-calorie, low-nutrition content:

Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed. However, when we asked people in an initial survey what type of content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through

Clickbait Is The Disease; Data Is The Cure

Facebook will attempt to protect users from such stories with … analytics! Specifically, the social network won’t punish Upworthy-style headlines in which “you won’t believe what happened next,” or other open questions. Instead, it will check how much time users spend on a link they’ve click and/or spent discussing it. (This new clickbait protection does not apply to sponsored posts and advertising, however.)

Facebook explains it this way:

If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.

No doubt this will come as a shock to the media outlets Facebook has so aggressively pursued in the last few years to make the social network its portal to more traffic.

Of course, if it doesn’t work, then Zuckerberg and Hudack will know who to blame. That’d be us, the clickbait-loving users. 

Update 3:26 p.m.: Updated to include sponsored stories will not be affected by the clickbait crackdown.

Lead image by Project Healing Waters Fly Fishing – Northern VA

About ReadWrite’s Editorial Process

The ReadWrite Editorial policy involves closely monitoring the tech industry for major developments, new product launches, AI breakthroughs, video game releases and other newsworthy events. Editors assign relevant stories to staff writers or freelance contributors with expertise in each particular topic area. Before publication, articles go through a rigorous round of editing for accuracy, clarity, and to ensure adherence to ReadWrite's style guidelines.

Get the biggest tech headlines of the day delivered to your inbox

    By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. Unsubscribe anytime.

    Tech News

    Explore the latest in tech with our Tech News. We cut through the noise for concise, relevant updates, keeping you informed about the rapidly evolving tech landscape with curated content that separates signal from noise.

    In-Depth Tech Stories

    Explore tech impact in In-Depth Stories. Narrative data journalism offers comprehensive analyses, revealing stories behind data. Understand industry trends for a deeper perspective on tech's intricate relationships with society.

    Expert Reviews

    Empower decisions with Expert Reviews, merging industry expertise and insightful analysis. Delve into tech intricacies, get the best deals, and stay ahead with our trustworthy guide to navigating the ever-changing tech market.