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The vast majority of readers find news articles and blog posts with deliberately misleading or mysterious headlines annoying.

And now Facebook is on a quest to 'weed out' links to 'click-baiting' stories that are designed to make people click on them.

The social network says that by monitoring how long people spend reading news articles, as well as how they interact with them, it can prioritise the best content that pops up in people's News Feeds. 

Facebook is on a quest to relegate links to 'click-baiting' stories that don't live up to their promises and are merely designed to make people click on them. The example above was given by Facebook in a blog post. The social network has tweaked its News Feed algorithm so that rankings of such articles are lowered

Facebook has tweaked its News Feed algorithm to lower the ranking of click-bait links.

In a blog post, research scientist Khalid El-Arini, and Joyce Tang, a product specialist at Facebook, said the firm has made improvements 'to help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant, and to continue to weed out stories that people frequently tell us are spammy and that they don't want to see.' 

Facebook said a survey revealed that 80 per cent of its users prefer headlines what make the content of an article crystal clear, so they can work out if a link is worth clicking on.

The experts wrote: 'Over time, stories with "click-bait" headlines can drown out content from friends and Pages that people really care about.' 

The social network has tweaked its News Feed algorithm to lower the ranking of click-bait links, by monitoring how long people read news stories for. It already manipulates which stories appear high up in news feeds (pictured) so users get the most appropriate content, the company said.

To crack down on the practice, Facebook is lowering the ranking of click-bait links, so that links with clear headlines are more likely to show up in a user's news feed.

Mr El-Arini and Ms Tang said that Facebook is doing this by measuring how long people spend reading stories after clicking on them, as well as observing if they 'like' or comment on an article.

'If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn't find something that they wanted,' the pair wrote.

'If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn't click through to something that was valuable to them.

It is thought that websites merely trying to score hits will suffer as a result of the change, but that large, playful websites, which sometimes use the technique, won't be affected.

Facebook said: 'A small set of publishers who are frequently posting links with click-bait headlines that many people don't spend time reading after they click through may see their distribution decrease in the next few months.

'We're making these changes to ensure that click-bait content does not drown out the things that people really want to see on Facebook.'