Meta will try to reduce the amount of spam in the Facebook feed

Meta has officially acknowledged the problem: Facebook is full of spam. In response to a growing number of complaints, the company announced its intention to limit the reach of publications from authors who abuse long, misleading captions, as well as those whose texts do not correspond to the content.

According to the statement, such accounts will not only face a decrease in the visibility of their posts, but will also lose access to monetization. In addition, the company plans to more actively combat artificially inflated engagement – comments from such profiles will be limited, and pages that use questionable promotion methods will begin to be deleted.

One of the new features that Meta is testing is the ability to anonymously downgrade comments, marking them as “unnecessary.” This is part of the company’s overall strategy to update Facebook and attract a younger audience.

However, the list of events did not include one of the most noticeable problems of the past year – the flow of meaningless AI content, the so-called “AI slop”. These images, created by generative neural networks, are often meaningless and are designed only to catch the eye and collect likes. Such publications are actively promoted by Facebook algorithms and have not yet been restricted.

Meta also says that it pays attention to protecting original content and stepping up the fight against plagiarism. But against the backdrop of the massive distribution of generated materials and the availability of such tools, achieving rapid progress in cleaning up the platform will not be easy.

Meta also announced the expansion of the Facebook Stories monetization program, giving creators the opportunity to earn money from content views.

Participants in previous programs, such as In-Stream Ads, Ads on Reels and Performance Bonus, will be automatically connected to the new system, and registration is open for new creators. The platform will start paying out rewards for popular short videos, including clips uploaded from other services, such as YouTube.

The expansion of monetization is part of Meta’s strategy to attract new creators, including content creators from other social networks such as TikTok. In 2024, the company paid out more than $2 billion, and creators’ income from short videos increased by 80%.