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Facebook to reduce misleading health claims in News Feed

By IANS | Updated: July 3, 2019 09:35 IST

Facebook has begun addressing sensational and misleading nutrition, health and fitness claims on its platform by lowering them in your News Feed.

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The social networking platform said has made two ranking updates to reduce posts with exaggerated or sensational health claims and posts attempting to sell products or services based on health-related claims.

"For the first update, we consider if a post about health exaggerates or misleads for example, making a sensational claim about a miracle cure," Facebook said in a blog post late Tuesday.

"For the second update, we consider if a post promotes a product or service based on a health-related claim a" for example, promoting a medication or pill claiming to help you lose weight," it added.

Facebook is handling such health posts in a similar way it has claimed to previously reduce low-quality content like click-bait.

"We identify phrases that were commonly used in these posts to predict which posts might include sensational health claims or promotion of products with health-related claims, and then showing these lower in News Feed," said the company.

According to Facebook, most Pages won't see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed as a result of this update.

"Posts with sensational health claims or solicitation using health-related claims will have reduced distribution," it added.

Pages should avoid posts about health that exaggerate or mislead people and posts that try to sell products using health-related claims.

"If a Page stops posting this content, their posts will no longer be affected by this change," said Facebook.

( With inputs from IANS )

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