WASHINGTON: Facebook said on Wednesday it was making changes designed to keep its users from linking to “low-quality” websites, part of an effort to fight spam and misinformation.

The world’s biggest social network said it is updating its ranking algorithm with the help of artificial intelligence so users would see fewer posts “that link to these low-quality web page experiences.”

“With this update, we reviewed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to/from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads,” a Facebook blog post said.

“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,” the blog post from researchers Jiun-Ren Lin and Shengbo Guo said. “This way people can see fewer misleading posts and more informative posts.”

Published in Dawn, May 11th, 2017