In a recent announcement, the Facebook team has stated that all the
engagement posts on facebook will now be stopped. It should be brought into
concern that such posts requires user to engage with them, in forms of mote likes
or comments, which makes the posts rank higher on the priority order. As these
posts involve click bait and tagging people, therefore the netizens get attracted to
such posts very easily. This step was welcomed by the people, as it would help to
standardise and raise the quality content of Facebook posts, which we have seen
is towards a steep decline. To clarify, any post which asks the users to either involve more of their friends in it, or involve themselves only, come in the category of such posts. For eg. “ ten
things which you can do to….click to know them” or “tag your friend who dies…”.
Such posts requires the user attention, which actually diverts the limelight from
more serious and important posts. Therefore, to control such things, Facebook is
planning to develop an artificial intelligence, which would help to read and block
out such posts. Facebook, has therefore given sometime to the publishers to
adapt to these measures as soon as they can.
Moreover, there is a plethora of pages on Facebook, whose existence depends on
people’s engagement with their posts. For eg. Scoopwhoop, which has many such pages on Facebook, regularly publishes click bait articles, where users are
tempted to click to look at things like “ ten things which men should not do while
getting a blowjob”. It’s not only scoopwhoop, but regular meme pages like
Rajnikant v/s CID jokes, Unilad, Bollywood gandu, tag your best friend etc, requires users to tag their friends on things like “ tag your friend who does this ( this being some random weird thing)”. These kind of pages just tarnish the viability and penetration power of social media in people
today. The amount of people reacting and commenting on such preposterous
ridiculousness is alarmingly huge. And it raises a big question on the credibility of
social media in our lives. It makes us question the very idea that can social media
be useful?. These kind of posts divert the attention from more serious kind of
posts which actually needs peoples attention.
These recent steps are all in consideration to maintain the credibility of facebook
as a social media platform, which in the recent times has proved to dubious and
ambiguously misleading. It will ensure that the important and meaningful posts
get the attention they deserve, and the masses can actually benefit from them;
which is the actual motive behind the step.
