Facebook to Reduce Click-Bait Headlines With This One Weird Trick ⇥ newsroom.fb.com

Khalid El-Arini and Joyce Tang of Facebook:

So how do we determine what looks like click-bait?

One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.

Facebook’s tracking code makes this sort of thing possible, which seems both more useful to me than serving me ads, and edging closer to the creepy line. But this serves to reiterate the point Zeynep Tufekci made in her article about the algorithms used by Twitter and Facebook to highlight stuff we might be interested in: what makes this code ideal to decide what is important to us? There’s a lot of responsibility inherent to a deployment of an algorithm update used for user feed selection and sorting, but it increasingly feels as though it’s not being given the respect it deserves by Facebook and Twitter staff.