Facebook to reduce "low quality" links in News Feed

Facebook, Inc. said Friday it has made an update available to help "reduce low quality links in News Feed."

The update, apparently an effort to filter out spam and fake news, is based on the social media network's research findings that there is a tiny group of people who routinely share vast amounts of public posts per day, effectively spamming people's feeds.

"Our research further shows that the links they share tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation," said Facebook, which claims to be "always working to improve people's experience in News Feed by showing more stories that we think people will find informative and entertaining."

"As a result, we want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritize the links they share more frequently than regular sharers. Of course, this is only one signal among many others that may affect the ranking prioritization of this type of post. This update will only apply to links, such as an individual article, not to domains, Pages, videos, photos, check-ins or status updates."

By taking steps like this to improve News Feed, Facebook claimed that it would be able to surface more stories that people find informative and reduce the spread of problematic links such as clickbait, sensationalism and misinformation.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of the technology company headquartered in Menlo Park, Northern California, announced earlier this week that it reached Tuesday a new milestone with 2 billion people worldwide connecting to Facebook every month.