Meta is lastly acknowledging that Fb’s feed is full of too many spammy posts. In an replace, the corporate says it plans to begin “cracking down” on among the worst offenders. “Fb Feed doesn’t at all times serve up recent, participating posts that you simply constantly take pleasure in,” the corporate writes. “We’re engaged on it.”
Particularly, Meta says it should decrease the attain of creators that share posts with “lengthy, distracting captions” in addition to posts with captions which can be irrelevant or unrelated to the shared content material. These accounts may even now not be eligible for monetization. Likewise, the corporate says it’s taking “extra aggressive” steps to fight “spam networks that coordinate pretend engagement.” This contains making feedback from these accounts much less seen, and eradicating Fb pages meant to “inflate attain.” Meta can be testing a function that enables customers to anonymously downvote feedback to be able to flag them as not “helpful.”
The replace comes as Meta is making an attempt to revamp Fb to make it extra interesting to “younger adults.” The corporate just lately introduced again a tab for associates content material, in an replace Mark Zuckerberg described as making the platform extra like “OG Fb.” Notably although, Meta’s replace doesn’t point out one of many extra persistent types of engagement bait that’s emerged on Fb during the last 12 months: AI slop.
The phenomenon, which has been extensively documented by 404 Media, concerned weird, usually nonsensical AI-generated photos — just like the now notorious “Shrimp Jesus” — that serve little goal apart from to farm engagement for individuals making an attempt to earn money on or off Fb. These spammers are sometimes aided by Fb’s personal algorithm, which boosts the posts, researchers have discovered.
AI slop and engagement bait aren’t the one kinds of low-quality posts which have overwhelmed customers’ Fb feeds lately. I often see posts from pages that appear to do nothing however screenshot previous Reddit posts from r/AITA, or recycle previous information about celebrities I don’t comply with or significantly care about. Meta’s stories on probably the most widely-viewed content material on its platform often function anodyne posts which can be engineered to rack up thousands and thousands of feedback, like those who ask customers to remark “amen” or clear up fundamental math equations. Posts like that will not match neatly into Meta’s newest crackdown, although it’s unlikely many Fb customers are literally having fun with this content material.
The corporate does notice it’s additionally making an attempt to “elevate” the creators which can be truly sharing unique content material, together with by cracking down on accounts that steal their work. However given how a lot simpler it’s to make AI slop than good unique content material, it may very well be a very long time earlier than Meta is ready to get Fb’s spam drawback underneath management.
