I remember, probably about a year ago, I went to a Facebook event and spoke one-on-one with Facebook engineers about spam. They seem to have the sense that it was not a problem then enough to work on it at an engineering level. Maybe I was off because it seemed unlikely but hey - now they are coming out talking about spam algorithms they have released specifically to clean up the news feed.
Facebook is working on three areas of news feed spam:
(1) Like-baiting: When a post explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive.
(2) Frequently Circulated Content: People and Pages on Facebook frequently reshare great content, but there are occasionally instances where photos or videos are uploaded to Facebook over and over again.
(3) Spammy Links: Some stories in News Feed use inaccurate language or formatting to try and trick people into clicking through to a website that contains only ads or a combination of frequently circulated content and ads. For instance, often these stories claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads.
Facebook is now targeting these techniques to reduce the level of this spam in the news feed.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
