FB宣布将严禁“标题党”乱人耳目

Facebook is taking another stab at reducing the amount of "clickbait" in your news feed.

Facebook正在为减少“信息流”中的“标题党”做新的尝试。

"These are headlines that intentionally leave out crucial information, forcing people to click to find out the answer," the company said in an announcement on Thursday.

周四，Facebook宣布：“有许多标题有意遗漏关键信息，迫使人们点进去寻找答案。”

In other words: The headline on this story better be pretty specific.

换句话说：故事中的标题需要更加具体。

Publishers large and small pay very close attention to every adjustment of the Facebook algorithm, since the social network drives so much traffic to news and entertainment web sites.

因为这家社交网站为资讯和娱乐网站提供了大量流量，所以无论大小发行人始终密切关注着Facebook规则系统里的每一个调整。

The company made a big change at the end of June that was meant to prioritize posts from friends over posts from brands and publishers.

6月末，Facebook做出了将朋友发布的信息置于品牌和发行商的推送之上的巨大改变。

Thursday's change is not as sweeping, but it will still affect what you see in the news feed, and it will affect how web sites produce news.

相比之下，周四的调整并没有那么彻底，然而它仍然会影响你在“信息流”中看到的内容以及网站制作资讯的方式。

Facebook is targeting headlines like -- this is an example they came up with -- "When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS... I Was SHOCKED!"

“当她看沙发垫下面的时候发现了这个……我都震惊了!”诸如此类的标题是Facebook的打击对象。

Facebook staffers Alex Peysakhovich and Kristin Hendrix said in a blog post that the company has "built a system to detect clickbait headlines."

Facebook旗下员工亚历克斯•派萨克维奇和克莉丝汀•亨德里克斯在博客中表示公司已经“建立了一个检测‘标题党’的系统。”

It is "similar to how many email spam filters work," they wrote. "Our system identifies posts that are clickbait, and which web domains and Pages these posts come from. Links from or shared from Pages that consistently post clickbait headlines will appear lower in News Feed. News Feed will continue to learn over time — If a Page stops posting clickbait headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change."

他们在文中写道：“类似屏蔽垃圾邮件的方式，我们的系统识别哪些发布的内容属于‘标题党’以及它们网站域名和网页来源。经常发布或者分享‘标题党’文章的链接就会被排在‘信息流’偏底部的位置。不过‘信息流’也会随着时间的改变不断调整，如果那些网页不再发布‘标题党’文章，他们的推送位置也将再次改变。”

"Clickbait" has been a scourge of the web for several years. But the term means different things to different people. So Thursday's announcement will be parsed by publishers for details about what Facebook thinks it is.

“标题党”是网络多年的祸害。但是不同的人对其又有着不同的理解。所以，周四的通告将被发行商们就什么是Facebook所谓的“标题党”进行细剖。

Peysakhovich and Hendrix define it this way:

派萨克维奇和亨德里克斯是这么解释的：

"If the headline withholds information required to understand what the content of the article is" and "if the headline exaggerates the article to create misleading expectations for the reader."

判断的标准是如果标题“故意隐瞒有助于理解文章内容的信息”以及“夸大其词，从而误导读者”。

Entire networks of web sites exist to win traffic through these types of headlines.

所有的网站都存在通过这类标题来赢得浏览量的现象。

The announcement didn't address whether sponsored posts -- that is, posts that sites pay Facebook to bring more visitors to -- would also be penalized for clickbait headlines.

在通告中，公司并未指明网站向Facebook付款以确保更多浏览量的“赞助帖”是否会因“标题党”而受处罚。

This is the second time Facebook has specifically tried to tamp down on the behavior. A round of algorithm tweaks to address clickbait were announced in August 2014.

这是Facebook第二次专门打击这类行为。在2014年8月，官方曾宣布开展一轮针对打击“标题党”的系统微调。

Back then, the company acknowledged that the algorithm was inadvertently rewarding such stories, because the links "tend to get a lot of clicks," but users found the stories to be unsatisfying.

那时候，公司承认系统会不经意间偏好这样的文章，因为它们往往容易取得“更高的点击率”，但是用户却经常抱怨。

Two years later, this remains true, Facebook said.

Facebook表示，尽管已经过去两年，情况依旧。

Why does the company care if you're satisfied by the links you click? Because the happier you are with your Facebook experience, the more often you'll come back to Facebook.

为什么这家公司如此在意你点击链接时的满意度呢?因为你的Facebook体验越愉悦，你回去使用Facebook的频率就越高。

Vocabulary

scourge: 灾祸;苦难的根源

parse: 解析(词、句等);理解

inadvertently: 无心地