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Facebook’s first step towards reducing political content: All you need to know
The social media firm, over the next few months, will work to understand the varied preferences for political content and test a number of approaches based on those insights.
Facebook, Inc. on Wednesday announced that the company will temporarily reduce the amount of political content in the News Feed of a small percentage of people in a few countries. The announcement comes days after Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, in an earnings call, indicated that the social media giant plans to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations in the United States for the long term and expand the policy globally.
Zuckerberg had said that such steps are necessary to ensure the communities users connect with are healthy and positive. The 36-year-old internet entrepreneur then revealed that the company was considering steps to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed as well. Citing feedback from Facebook users, Zuckerberg said that “people don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services.”
“So one theme for this year is that we're going to continue to focus on helping millions more people participate in healthy communities and we're going to focus even more on being a force for bringing people closer together,” he added.
Facebook has now said in a blog post that the upcoming changes to the News Feed are along similar lines. It added that although the company already offers controls to help users manage what they see in their feed, it is trying to find a new balance of the content people want to see.
Here are important takeaways from today’s announcement:
The social media firm, over the next few months, will work to better understand the varied preferences for political content and test a number of approaches based on those insights.
Facebook will temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in the News Feed this week for a limited number of users in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia. It will extend the move in the United States in the coming weeks.
It will explore ways to rank political content in the feeds of Facebook users using different signals, and then decide on the approaches the company will use going forward.
Content from official government agencies and services, Covid-19 information from health organisations and agencies will be exempt from these tests.
It will not remove political content from Facebook altogether to preserve people’s ability to find and interact with political content on the social media platform “while respecting each person’s appetite for it at the top of their News Feed.”
Facebook will carry out a survey on the users’ experience during these tests.
