The social network is now scanning links to see if they contain “disruptive, shocking or malicious ads” and little real content.

BuzzFeed / Getty Images

Facebook’s quest to rid the News Feed of misinformation and misleading content has a new target: websites that are littered with “disruptive, shocking or malicious ads,” and that offer little actual content. Beginning today, the social network will use artificial intelligence to determine if links shared on the social network direct people to websites that offer a “low quality web page experience” due to the nature of the ads and content being offered. Links that meet the criteria will show up lower in the News Feed, and will not be eligible to to be turned into an ad on Facebook. The type of ads being targeted by Facebook most frequently appear in the form of content-recommendation ad units. These boxes placed adjacent to articles offer a headline and striking thumbnail image meant to entice people to click. The low-end variety of these ads use sexualized and sometimes shocking images, as well as celebrities, and misleading headlines to capture attention. Here, for example, is a set of ads served by Content.ad on a fake news article:

A recent report from BuzzFeed News found content-recommendation ads are the primary way fake news sites are making money from their articles. A study from ChangeAdvertising.org also found that these types of ads, though not necessarily the lowest-quality versions of them, are present on more than 80% of the top 50 news websites in the US. “We’re looking at the content of the ads themselves — are the ads these gross toenail fungus ads, are these sexually suggestive ads,” Greg Marra, a Facebook product manager who works on News Feed integrity, told BuzzFeed News. “We also look at ads in relation to the content on the page. Is it a page that has basically no substantive content and is full of these ads?” BuzzFeed News recently profiled exactly the kind of site Facebook is now targeting. TrueTrumpers.com is a pro-Trump website run from Eastern Europe that often publishes completely false headlines meant to grab attention on Facebook. But once a person clicks through they are brought to a webpage that is littered with content ad units and that often contains no article text other than the false or misleading headline. The site also triggers a pop-up ad when a visitor clicks anywhere on the page. A hoax from the site about actor Uma Thurman dying in a plane crash contains at least four different Content.ad units, three of which are displayed to the user before they see the text of the (fake) article:

True Trumpers / Via archive.is