Not for the first time, Facebook is on a mission to clean up your News Feed – presumably so its billion-plus users will spend more time browsing it and less time posting photos to Instagram and Snapchat.

This time the social network’s highly trained algorithms are going after “low-quality web page experiences”, so think sites that are stuffed with spammy ads and very little in the way of actual content. Clickbait is in the crosshairs too.

“We’re always working to understand which posts people consider misleading, sensational and spammy so we can show fewer of those and show more informative posts instead,” Facebook explained in a blog post.

News values

The clean-up will affect both standard posts and sponsored content, and is designed to make it harder for spammers to make money off the back of Facebook. The changes are rolling out as of now but make take a month or two to reach you.

Facebook’s engineers say they reviewed hundreds of thousands of web pages to get an idea of what spammy sites looked like, then trained an artificial intelligence engine to try and spot these types of links in the future – which hopefully means more quality content in your daily browse through the News Feed.

Like much of Facebook, the News Feed is constantly tweaked and refined, but this update sounds like a major one. It’s also notable for the way AI is being deployed to scan a lot more material than mere humans could alone.