Meta has been saying for a while that they don’t want to promote political content on their apps, and for that reason they have added an option to Instagram and Threads that limits the recommendations of “political content”. Coincidentally, there are elections for the White House in 8 months.
You can find it in the “Content Preferences” section of your Instagram account settings. From there, the option “Limit political content from people you don’t follow” is enabled by default.
The adjustment also applies to Threads, since this application shares its account system with Instagram. Right now you can already change this parameter, something interesting due to the fake news on these social networks.
Why don’t they want political content?
Meta has framed this new adjustment as good for user choice, and the company says it is not limiting the reach of political content from accounts that people choose to follow.
Although the change was first announced in early February, Meta began implementing it widely last week. Until Monday, the company had not sent any in-app notifications to alert users about the setting and the fact that it is enabled by default.
If you talk to people at Meta about why they don’t recommend politics, you will usually hear that they believe most people don’t want to see it in their feeds. However, last year, Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, was more direct about the company’s motivation in a conversation with me on Threads.
“Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise,” he said. “But in my opinion, from the platform’s perspective, the increase in engagement or revenue they can generate is not worth it at all considering the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or risks to integrity they entail,” he explained.
So there you have it: Meta doesn’t want the consequences of its role in actively spreading political content, which it defines as messages about “governments,” “elections,” and “social issues,” an ambiguous term that probably aims to give a lot of leeway for what can be included in this policy.
