Home > News

New Facebook Algorithm Shows Spam in Top 20 Links

By Laura Tucker
Facebook Spam Links Featured

Meta tried to put a positive spin on its latest news about Facebook, but it’s still alarming. The “widely-viewed content report” was shared with a new way of calculating which links belong in the top positions, but it really shows that much of its most-read content on Facebook is spam.

Also read: Facebook Will No Longer Keep Track of Your Location History

Meta Releases Facebook “Widely-Viewed Content Report”

Meta’s release of the 2022 Q1 widely-viewed content report explains that it has changed the way the list of the top 20 links shared on Facebook is calculated.

Previously, this report included all links that were shared on Facebook. However, it was criticized for including links that didn’t show a preview. This gave leverage to Facebook Pages that shared links with hidden spam.

Facebook Spam Links Apps
Image Source: Unsplash

“Moving forward, links will need to render a preview in order to be counted as a view, as that more accurately represents what people are seeing,” revealed an accompanying blog post.

Meta set it up by stating, “this report highlights the most-viewed organic content in Feed in the U.S., including domains, links, Pages, and posts. It includes content recommended by Facebook and excludes advertising content.”

Meta helpfully shared the Facebook 2022 Q1 results with both the old and new algorithms, but this revealed worrisome news: six of the top 20 links were removed from Facebook because they were assumed to be spam.

The old algorithm showed the top 20 links, with the number one and three spots going to YouTube links and the second to myincrediblerecipes.com. The 11th and 14th links were blocked on the report “for violating our Inauthentic Behavior policy” with a note that “content with links to this domain can no longer be created on Facebook.”

Facebook Spam Links Website
Image Source: Unsplash

Though Meta prefaces the second algorithm by stating it includes links that “ranged from humor, culture, to DIY,” it showed six links that were blocked for “violating our Inauthentic Behavior policy,” including the first and second links.

Meta did acknowledge in the blog post that “the removed links were all from the same domain.” These links were from the Vietnam-based Naye News. It’s not known which links were removed nor what was included in the content. Yet, the links accumulated more than 112 million views combined before the domain was removed.

Facebook Spam Links App
Image Source: Unsplash

Additionally, the link in the fourth spot was a viral YouTube video of a town hall meeting with Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and a nurse who was making claims about COVID treatments. The link was demoted on Facebook after fact-checkers found the claims to be false.

The link in the 15th spot is a website that now redirects to a site that tries to get visitors to download malware. Initially, it showed a meme that read, “They told me the virus is everywhere. I told them so is God. Can I get an Amen? I bet you won’t repost.”

After revealing the spam in the top 20 links, Meta said in the blog post that they’ve “been testing new ways to reduce clickbait, engagement bait, and spam” on Facebook. You can also be more proactive by learning how to spot a phishing email and similar scams on Facebook.

Featured Image Credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.