The social network will update its algorithm to reduce visibility to low-quality sites in newsfeeds, in an effort to counter misinformation and ensure links to outside Web sites provide a good experience for the user.
This is an expansion on a policy put in place last year by Facebook to prevent advertisers with low-quality Web page experiences from advertising on its platform. The enforcement on ads will be increased and also be used on organic posts in users' newsfeeds.
Facebook said in a blog post, in order to apply this update to organic posts, it "reviewed hundreds of thousands of Web pages linked to Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.
It then used artificial intelligence to understand whether new Web pages shared on Facebook had similar characteristics.
"So, if we determine a post might link to these types of low-quality Web pages, it may show up lower in people's feeds and may not be eligible to be an ad. This way people can see fewer misleading posts and more informative posts."
Last year it was reported the company received thousands of complaints daily about clickbait - headlines that intentionally withhold information or mislead users to get people to click on them. The social network followed a similar approach to counter these headlines by tweaking its algorithm.
The company hopes these updates will help reduce the economic incentives of financially motivated spammers.
In 2013, a report by security researchers Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli showed spammers who post links to Facebook pages could earn up to $200 million per year.
The algorithm update will roll-out over the next few months, and publishers are warned they will experience a decline in traffic if they link to low-quality Web pages.
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