Facebook has faced heavy criticism related to privacy, monetisation of user data, impacting US Presidential elections and much more in the past years, and intending to improve their platform they’ll now be limiting any health content that is “sensational or misleading”.
With the new updates, Facebook is going to tackle spammy, misleading and sensational content related to nutrition, fitness and health on the social network by limiting the reach of such posts by showing them lower in the news feed.
Last month, Facebook updated how it ranks posts, and based on that now the company will be reducing the reach of posts that exaggerate or sensationalise a health claim and posts that sell products based on false claims.
“In order to help people get accurate health information and the support they need, it’s imperative that we minimise health content that is sensational or misleading,” writes Travis Yeh, Product Manager at Facebook. “We know that people don’t like posts that are sensational or spammy, and misleading health content is particularly bad for our community.”
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Clickbait posts like those that make a “sensational claim about a miracle cure” or those that promote a “medication or pill claiming to help you lose weight” will be impacted by this update.
According to the company, this update shouldn’t impact the distribution of pages that don’t share sensational health claims or promote products based on a health-related claim.
“Posts with sensational health claims or solicitation using health-related claims will have reduced distribution. Pages should avoid posts about health that exaggerate or mislead people and posts that try to sell products using health-related claims.”
If a page was posting such misleading content and their reach has been impacted, the limitations put on that page will be lifted as soon as they stop posting such content.
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