Facebook is cracking down on clickbait in your News Feed

Facebook is promising to crack down on the "clickbait" in your News Feed, with two new updates to the site.

They say that by monitoring how long people spend reading news articles, they can prioritise the best content.

The thinking is that with clickbait, most people only spend a matter of moments on the site before clicking back to Facebook to find something else less "spammy".

In a post in its online newsroom, Facebook said: "Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.

"However, when we asked people in an initial survey what type of content they preferred to see in their News Feeds, 80% of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through."

They will also monitor how much a post is liked or shared to decide whether or not it is "valuable" to users.

The other plan to tackle clickbait is to prioritise articles shown in a link format, as opposed to ones where the link is put into a photo caption.

According to Facebook's studies link posts get "twice as many clicks compared to links embedded in photo captions".

So what's going to happen to the clickbait that can clutter up your News Feed? Does this mean it will be gone for good?

Facebook claims a "small set of publishers" will be affected and they may see their "distribution decrease" in the near future.