Facebook thinks headlines need to sober up. (credit: Jon S)

In 2014, Facebook said it was going to take steps to favor clear headlines over so-called clickbait, which it defines as headlines that try to cultivate interest in a story by omitting key pieces of information, or by misrepresenting what’s in the actual post. Now, the social media giant has revised its clickbait-tackling scheme, which for the past two years has been downgrading posts based on the amount of time Facebook users spend on the article after they click the headline.

In a post today, Facebook said that its current plan of attack involved cataloging “tens of thousands” of headlines, which were then analyzed by a team of employees that decided if the headlines withheld pertinent information or were misleading about the accompanying article. The team apparently double-checked its work, and “from there, we built a system that looks at the set of clickbait headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines,” Facebook wrote in a press release today. “This is similar to how many e-mail spam filters work.”

Facebook added that its new system, instructed by the categorizations of human employees, would continue to actively learn which sites and Facebook Pages produce clickbait.