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Facebook updates News Feed in its ongoing battle against fake news and spam

By Sean Larkin, Programmatic Reporter

June 30, 2017 | 3 min read

Facebook has rounded-off a milestone week with the announcement that it is to tweak its News Feed algorithm in an update geared towards relegating spammers and accounts sharing fake news.

Facebook's latest News Feed announcements comes the same week as it revealed its has hit the 2 billion monthly user mark

Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s vice president, News Feed, today (June 30) published a blog post claiming the update would help help reduce low quality links, and underlined the social network’s commitment towards promoting content that accurately informs its 2 billion-plus account holders.

“As a result, we want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritize the links they share more frequently than regular sharers,” reads the post.

“Of course, this is only one signal among many others that may affect the ranking prioritization of this type of post. This update will only apply to links, such as an individual article, not to domains, Pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates.”

Mosseri’s post goes on to assure most publishers that the update will not significantly alter their use of the social network as a distribution channel, but he did add that publishers “should keep in mind these basic guideposts to reach their audience on Facebook."

Earlier in the week, Facebook also announced that it has now hit the 2 billion registered monthly user mark. Additionally, Facebook also announced this week that is has released a new household targeting tool, as well as creative updated to dynamic ads.

The suite of household targeting tools let marketers tap into Facebook's household-level insights on shopper behavior as well as measure the effectiveness of engaging with these audiences.

For instance, the updates mean that marketers can create a new household audience that includes additional people who live in the same household from people in the original seed audience.

“The seed can be a custom audience or a saved audience defined by Facebook's native targeting (eg age, gender, interest, etc),” according to Facebook.

In addition, the updates also offer “new creative opportunities for dynamic ads” which allow advertisers to inform customers about their products, as they can now apply specific product information over their original ad creative.

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