Recently Facebook announced several updates to News Feed specifically focused on improving the integrity of the information visitors find on Facebook.
In continuation of this effort, it has shared a series of guiding principles to help publishers reach readers while following its Community Standards, which discourage clickbait, misinformation and sensationalism.
People expect the stories in their feed to be meaningful to them and Facebook has learned over time that people value stories that they consider informative.
“We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about, but we are in the business of connecting people with the stories they find most meaningful. Publishers should create meaningful and informative stories that their audiences will find interesting.”
- Meaningful: Facebook’s descriptor takes into account many personal factors, such as how close someone is to a person or page and how they’ve shared and engaged with similar content, as well as the length of time they read a story or watch a video.
- Informative: This subjective factor considers how users have engaged in the past. People value stories that provide informative context to their lives, which is different for each and every person. Some are interested in sports, others in politics, and yet others in cooking.
- Clear headlines: Pages should avoid headlines that withhold information required to understand what the content of the article is and headlines that exaggerate or sensationalize the article to create misleading expectations.
- Spam: Pages should not deliberately try and game News Feed to get more distribution than they normally would.
- Accurate information: We know there is misinformation on Facebook, and we take this very seriously. False information is harmful to our community, it makes the world less informed, and it erodes trust.
- Keeping you safe: We remove content, disable accounts, and work with law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety. Learn more about how Facebook handles abusive content here.
- Encouraging respectful behavior: To serve the needs of our diverse community, we may remove or limit audiences for certain kinds of sensitive content. This includes nudity, hate speech, violence and graphic content.
Facebook has updated the News Feed to take all of the above factors into account, and they suggest that all publishers consider these tenets for the best response from followers and friends.
