Facebook's battle against spammers and fake news publishers continues. The social network giant said that it's going tactical in its attempt to stop spammy and untrustworthy contents from invading users' News Feed.
After being able to pinpoint individual posts and links, the company leverages its feat by targeting individual users who post those low-quality links.
According to Facebook, it has noticed a "tiny group of people" on its network that regularly post a more than usual links to spammy web pages. The links they share "tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation."
By targeting individuals who post those links, Facebook aims to reduce the reach of those people's post by stopping it from showing on others' News Feeds.
The publishers that would be affected are the ones who get a lot of traffic from accounts that Facebook has identified as spammers. In the case of those publishers, articles linked to by the spammers "may see a reduction" in reach on Facebook, according to the company.
Facebook's News Feed update is targeting links, such as an individual article, not to domains, Pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates.
Targeting only those spammers, "most publishers won't see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed," said Facebook on its blog post.
"Publishers that get meaningful distribution from people who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day may see a reduction in the distribution of those specific links. As always, publishers should keep in mind these basic guideposts to reach their audience on Facebook and continue to post stories that are relevant to their audiences and that their readers find informative," said Facebook.
Facebook, won't suspend people for just sharing or spamming News Feed with 50+ posts a day. As a social network, it doesn't want to mess with its users' right to share. But since fake news are becoming too annoying for users, Facebook and its global audience, the social media is trying to demote those links for a better cause.
Only about 0.1 percent of Facebook users share more than 50 posts a day. And those "tiny amount" (millions of people, given by Facebook's 2 billion users) would be affected if they meet certain criteria.
For the broader goal, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the issue as part of his remarks, pointing to the steps Facebook has already taken in the past, including making it harder for fake news spammers to make money from ads.