Facebook and junk headlines: you won’t believe what happened next!
Facebook has finally decided to take action against clickbait, or junk headlines, although the timelines of all your friends are already irremediably infested with them, and also intends to modify its algorithms to allow it to move to reduce the impact of news items that use these kinds of techniques to capture our attention.
Clickbait is junk, pure and simple. A sensationalist technique based on cod psychology that is unsustainable, the equivalent of shouting instead of talking, or of writing in bold capitals. That said, it works. A lot of people click on these kinds of headlines and that is overestimated by the algorithms, creating a kind of feedback. In reality, users hate these kinds of instant gratification news items, aware that they are nothing more than spam. There plague-like spread doesn’t make them any more acceptable, a sign of the times or anything good, unless you believe in the “millions of flies can’t be wrong” principle. If you stop sharing this kind of junk you will earn your friends’ respect and gratitude.
Publications such as Upworthy, Upsocl, or BuzzFeed, among others, have created an epidemic of these types of hideous headlines. Of course these techniques can increase traffic, something that BuzzFeed has been able to take advantage of via a $50 million investment that has raised its value to $850 million, three times that of The Washington Post.
Does this mean that the company is really worth this amount, or that it has found some kind of philosopher’s stone? Not really, it means that it has industrialized the process of creating junk, overstepping every frontier between content and advertising, and that for some reason, people like it. If the future of information or the web is this kind of prostitution to generate viewers at any price, then count me out.
After a harsh exchange of views with BuzzFeed, Facebook has decided to act against its methods and those of its many imitators, trying to impose restrictions via its algorithms able to distinguish between junk and real news. Will these kinds of initiatives bring about the fall of the publications that use junk, or are they simply Facebook’s way of reaffirming control over what its users can and can’t see?
Facebook’s key position as a traffic generator could lead one to think that modifying its algorithms could have a notable effect on the pages visited and the bottom line of these kinds of publications, but also raises questions about a social network acting as some kind of moral guardian.
For the moment, I think that Facebook’s decision is justified: clickbait exploits both an innate human weakness, as well social recommendation algorithms, and is clearly destroying the social network’s value proposition. If users aren’t prepared to take action to stop these kinds of yellow press tactics then somebody should do it for them. Facebook’s decision is based on self-preservation: users go to the site to see news that might interest them, not junk reassembled to capture their attention. This is a move to correct an anomaly, either of people or algorithms, but an anomaly in the final analysis.
(En español, aquí)
