Facebook’s New PageRank Method, Click-Gap
As there are more users on Facebook, there is more false news appearing on people’s News Feed. In order to prevent people from having false or inappropriate news in their Feeds, Facebook has announced a new algorithm called “Remove, Reduce, and Inform.” They will “remove” the contents that violate their policies, “reduce” the spread of those problematic contents, and “inform” people with more information to prevent people from viewing irrelevant content. From the “reduce” aspect, Facebook has incorporated the algorithm called “Click-Gap,” and this is almost identical to Google’s PageRank. PageRank method is an algorithm that calculates the importance of a link by measuring the quality and number of the link on the web. Similar to this, Click-Gap tries to filter fake news and harmful content from people’s News Feeds by looking through the entire web and determining if the post on Facebook has disproportionate amounts of traffic from the social network. If it seems like a post is inappropriate, then Facebook lowers the prominence of the post so that fewer people can view or access the link. To give an example, if one link primarily relies on Facebook to increase the number of viewers but does not have connected links with other websites such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Reddit, then there are high chances that the link has poor content. Facebook can repeat the process, and this automated approach can now contribute to reducing inappropriate content in our Feeds.
It was interesting to read the article because most of the concepts overlapped with what we covered in class. First, the basic idea behind Click-Gap and PageRank is the same. Web searches deal with information abundance, and so does the number of Facebook posts. Both algorithms exist to solve this primary problem. Also, since knowledge and web-browsing is social, searches should also be social, as stated in the lecture. Both algorithms reflect people’s choices on linking between pages, links, and posts. Not only this, but I also realized that the steps of Click-Gap are identical to the PageRank algorithm. The Basic PageRank Update Rule that we learned in class was starting by setting all the pages with an initial estimate of 1 and decreasing the values of it. Click-Gap also looks at how the posts are connected throughout the web, assigns a value to it, and removes the posts with low values. Not only this, but the article also connects to the Hub and Authority concepts that we went through. We learned that the authorities are the highly endorsed answers to queries, and hubs are the high-value lists for the queries. In a nutshell, good authorities are pointed by many hubs, and good hubs point to many good authorities. Keeping this concept in mind, Facebook is also analyzing how a post is linked by good sources (or other social media) such as Google or Bing. This could be considered as the hub and authority relationship. Overall, Facebook’s new algorithm is very similar to Google’s PageRank algorithm, and I hope they can further develop it so that Facebook users can enjoy their News Feed more conveniently.