Abstract: The disclosed embodiments provide a system for filtering irrelevant actor updates from content feeds. During operation, the system identifies a set of candidate content items to display to a user. Then, for each content item in the set of candidate content items, the system obtains a content score for the content item, determines a second user associated with the content item, determines a propensity for the user to click on content associated with the second user, and applies a penalty to the content score when the propensity is less than a pre-determined threshold. Finally, the system orders the set of candidate content items according to the content scores, and forwards the ordered set of content items for display to the user.