Jefferson Graham

USA TODAY

LOS ANGELES — Snap, the parent company of communications app Snapchat, clamped down on clickbait this week, revising its guidelines for allowable content from partners this week.

The company, which is expected to file an IPO in March that could reap as much as $25 billion, is toning down what partners like Cosmopolitan, the Daily Mail and BuzzFeed can show in the Snapchat "Discover" section.

Snap's updated guidelines are designed to ​"keep Snapchat an informative, factual, and safe environment for everyone and give Snapchatters more choices in how they view and engage with content that may be sensitive," the company says.

Snapchat says it has 150 million daily visitors. Discover's partners use the platform to showcase fast, flashy videos and share in advertising revenues.

The new guidelines prohibit sensitive content, including profanity, overly sexualized content, and violent content from the tiles that promote the publisher in Discover. Publishers with that kind of content will need to put warnings before anything that "is likely to shock or offend viewers." The exception is news—if the content can be proved as newsworthy and not click bait, "publishers may feature the content" in the tile "as long as they provide a prominent warning before it appears."

Snapchat's new guidelines also tackle how to handle "fake news," saying that all content has to be "fact-checked and accurate" and that links can't be "deceptive, misleading or fraudulent." Publishers may not "impersonate or claim to be another person or entity, create a false presence for an organization, or otherwise use the content in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse or deceive others."

A post in Medium over the summer took Snapchat publishers to task for excessive and suggestive clickbait.

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