Facebook To Downrank Low Quality Pages And Memes In New Algorithm

Facebook has stated that it intends to downrank low quality pages and memes as part of its new news feed algorithm. The new changes will see original content favoured over those who simply reshare the same things over and over. Facebook has stated that pages and posts requesting likes will also be downranked.

The new algorithm will thus use things like; relevance of content, originality, whether it is shared, whether it is a meme and so on to determine if it should appear on your news feed.

“We used the results of this survey to build a new machine learning system to detect content defined as high quality. The system uses over a thousand different factors, such as how frequently content from a certain Page is reported as low quality (e.g., hiding a Page post), how complete the Page profile is, and whether the fan base for a particular Page overlaps with the fan base of other known high quality Pages. Coming up with an algorithm to detect this is complex, and we will continue to refine it as we get more feedback.”

Pages with high engagement should expect to see continued growth. For Facebook users the end result should be “higher quality” news feeds with less junk posts.

However, many would argue that this is just another way of Facebook controlling what you see. As one reader “Philippe Durand” stated:

“Don’t bother with the algorithms. If I like a page, it means I consider its content of high quality for me. Therefore, I would like to see everything this page publishes. If I no longer consider it of quality, then I uncheck like on that page. It’s that simple. Please stop deciding for me what I should or shouldn’t read”

Do you agree with him? I know I do.

Image courtesy of Facebook