Facebook Amps Up Its Limits
The Search Engine Journal article from April delves into Facebook’s new process of making sure they are putting the best information forward, by limiting the spread of particular groups and pages. The article discusses that it will be using a new algorithm of Click-Gap signal in order to detect the authority of these pages and groups. The premise of this algorithm is that it looks at the in-bound and out-bound links and targets those with an uneven balance between the two. Facebook argues that based off this unequal number it points to the fact that a certain page is not producing the same quality of post that it has established externally. The company has made efforts to remove any links to what would be considered low-quality even if it was posted in a private group. Facebook is also placing more responsibility on the admins of these groups and is willing to shut a group down if the admin is not performing adequately. The main goal is to detect whether or not an admin is allowing posts that are in violation of the company’s standards. Lastly, this new algorithm will be implemented to reduce the amount of clickbait that is available to users.
While this article relates more broadly to class in terms of Facebook being a part of the World Wide Web, it relates closely to our class discussion of authority. To begin, it’s important to understand, “that links are essential to ranking: that we can use them to assess the authority of a page on a topic, through the implicit endorsements that other pages on the topic confer through their links to it” (399). This is nearly a direct correlation to the newly adopted Click-Gap method that Facebook has introduced. Beyond this, due to the abundance of information located on Facebook it would be extremely challenging to make these limits without the use of an algorithm. In class we discussed a method using the authority update rule and the hub update rule in order to calculate a score for each page. The algorithm is an attempt to figure out the quality of a page in terms of authority and as a hub. While the Click-Gap method is somewhat reflective of the voting by in-links section from class, it is more complex by making comparisons between the count of in-bound as well as out-bound links.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/facebook-click-gap/303033/#close