Facebook has stepped up its two-year-old anti-clickbait
campaign, changing its news feed algorithm to weed out manipulative or
deceptive headlines. The company says this is being done by popular
demand, but the reality is probably more complicated. As a heavy
Facebook user with more than 90,000 subscribers and about 4,200 friends,
I don’t want Facebook to do this: it’s another dangerous step towards
shrinking the view of the world people receive through the social
network.
Facebook researchers Alex Peysakhovich and
Kristin Hendrix explained the algorithm change in a post on Thursday.
Rather than reducing the distribution of links from which users quickly
bounce back to Facebook (which means they were probably enticed to click
and then disappointed), the company has tweaked the algorithm to look
for phrases commonly used in clickbait headlines.
The
definition of clickbait is important here. Facebook’s is currently
narrow: to be considered clickbait, a headline needs to withhold
information necessary to understand what the story is about (“You’ll
Never Believe Who Tripped and Fell on the Red Carpet…”), forcing users
to click on the link to find out the answer. Linguists call such tricks
deixis (the use of words that require a context to be understood) and
cataphora (a figure of speech in which an earlier expression describes a
“forward” expression that hasn’t come up yet). Facebook also has a
problem with headlines that exaggerate the impact of the story (“Apples
Are Actually Bad For You?!” leading to a piece saying it’s a bad idea to
eat 50 pounds of apples a day).
This would not rule out
most headlines from BuzzFeed, which, according to the social content
consultancy NewsWhip, is the second-biggest magnet for Facebook
comments, likes and shares among news sites.
BuzzFeed
claims it “doesn’t do clickbait” — but that’s using the same narrow
definition Facebook uses. That’s not how most people understand it: to
most of us, BuzzFeed’s formulaic listicle headlines — a number plus a
strong sales pitch for the subject, as in “23 Things That Will Make You
Feel Like an Adult” (the content being a collection of “native ads” for
everything from collapsible lunchboxes to wristwatches) — fall into the
clickbait category. Just like cataphoric headlines (“Why This Father
Feeds His Son Freakish Fruit and Vegetables”), they create what in 1994
behavioural economist George Loewenstein called a “curiosity gap”: They
focus the reader’s attention on a gap in her knowledge, producing “a
feeling of deprivation labelled curiosity”. That makes them clickbait,
too.
This year, a team from Bauhaus University in Weimar,
Germany, published a paper on clickbait detection. They built a
machine-learning-based model to analyse a set of news content links from
Twitter (not Facebook), but the results of their work — following
stricter criteria than Facebook says it’s using, 215 of them in all —
are revealing. Here’s what they found:
“Business Insider
sends 51pc clickbait, followed by Huffington Post, The Independent,
BuzzFeed, and The Washington Post with more than 40pc each. Most
online-only news publishers (Business Insider, Huffington Post,
BuzzFeed, Mashable) send at least 33pc clickbait, Bleacher Report being
the only exception with a little less than 10pc. TV networks (CNN, NBC,
ABC, Fox) are generally at the low end of the distribution.”
Most
online news publishers use headlines that, in the words of the Bauhaus
paper, “exploit cognitive biases to increase the likelihood of readers
clicking an accompanying link”. Yet content providers such as BuzzFeed
pay it to promote its “native advertising” posts, and Facebook pays them
to produce video content that helps Facebook sell more expensive ads.
My guess is that this limits Facebook’s willingness to hinder the
distribution of its content.
Facebook ends up fighting
only certain obvious kinds of clickbait, but as it does so, it’s
developing the capability to block content from our news feeds based on
certain words or expressions. Facebook has long been moving away from
being an impartial platform on which users can place any content. Since
late June, it’s been showing us more posts from friends and family and
less from news organisations. Now, there’s the anti-clickbait change.
Facebook’s
goal is to increase users’ engagement with every post and maximise the
time spent on the social network: It’s good for revenue. Yet since news
websites get more than 40 per cent of referral traffic from Facebook,
every such change limits the amount of information that reaches readers.
And some changes, including the latest one, even create the potential
for censorship and arbitrary selection.
I was happy with
Facebook as a platform, and I’m not the only one. Readers are generally
not dumb. In June, when the UK voted to leave the European Union, the
Financial Times — which, unlike BuzzFeed, really doesn’t do clickbait —
had one of the top percentages of shares among its Facebook
interactions, according to NewsWhip. The raciest tabloids with the
flashiest headlines covered Brexit, too, but people wanted to share the
FT’s sober journalism.
A Facebook user is usually smart
enough to distinguish real journalism from entertainment. She doesn’t
click on manipulative headlines expecting to find serious content, and
if some users complain about such experiences, they are not necessarily
representative of Facebook’s enormous user base. They certainly do not
represent me. I don’t want Facebook to curate — especially
algorithmically — the already-curated output of professional news
organisations.
If somebody wants to block certain types
of headlines — because they are manipulative, or for any other reason —
they should have access to filters to personalise their news feed.
Instead, Facebook presents users with a black box for fear of having its
algorithm reverse-engineered. That’s worse than not messing with the
natural flow of posts at all.
There is one more reason
Facebook’s anti-clickbait rule is wrong. At this stage of its
development, artificial intelligence is terrible at processing human
languages, and letting it police content is premature. The tweaked
algorithm would probably classify The New York Times’ and the Guardian’s
sarcastic headlines about Facebook as clickbait because they contain
the word “shocker” and the expression “you won’t believe”. Silicon
Valley companies are overconfident in their technology. They have to
admit humans are better at content, at least for now.
—By arrangement with Bloomberg-The Washington Post
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