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Posting links 50 times a day likely means you’re spreading fake news, Facebook says

The social network has found a new way to spot fake news and spam in users’ news feeds: posting too much.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
CREDIT: AP Photo/Matt Rourke

Facebook has identified a way to spot accounts sharing spam and fake news: posting too much.

The social network announced a change to its algorithm that will deprioritize posts and links from users that share more than 50 times a day. Facebook isn’t evaluating the contents of the links shared by high-volume posters, but it found a correlation between the volume and sharing spam, fake news, or clickbait.

“Our research shows that there is a tiny group of people on Facebook who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day, effectively spamming people’s feeds,” Facebook’s VP of the news feed, Adam Mosseri wrote in a blog post Friday. “Our research further shows that the links they share tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation.”

The changes could have a significant impact as Facebook recently hit 2 billion monthly users. In the United States alone, 44 percent of adults get their news from the social network, according to Pew Research.

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But the social network insists the algorithm change will have limited effects on the average user. Facebook said the change will only affect links shared by high-producing individual user accounts posting links to individual Facebook pages, videos, photos, status updates, check-ins, and articles. Domains are not affected, meaning the algorithm won’t bury all links from a particular site.

The algorithm change is one of many changes Facebook has made to better combat the spread of fake news on its platform after fending off months of criticism that it helped tip the 2016 presidential election. The company shut down thousands of bots ahead of the French presidential election, and published ads in British newspapers to teach readers how to spot fake news ahead of Britain’s general election in May. Facebook also released a fake news labeling tool and partnered with a third-party fact checking organization to address the problem earlier this year.

Facebook said its news feed is meant to be informative and the prevalence of fake news and spam is an impediment for users.

“By taking steps like this to improve News Feed, we’re able to surface more stories that people find informative and reduce the spread of problematic links.”