It’s been nearly a year since Instagram and Threads defaulted to blocking recommendations of “political” content from accounts you don’t already follow, but now Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says, “…we’re going to be adding political content to recommendations” on both platforms.

That’s a sharp turn from his statements in 2023laying out the goal of a “less angry place for conversations” that wouldn’t do anything to encourage politics or hard news. However, under Meta’s new approach to moderation — and new rules about what users can say on its platforms— that goal is going out the window just as the Trump administration prepares to take over.

Until now, users have had to opt-in to seeing recommendations of content deemed political, but the change rolling out this week in the US and to the rest of the world next week will turn on the recommendations and a content control setting available with options for less, standard (the default setting), and more.

In a series of Threads posts, Mosseri reiterated, “I’ve maintained very publicly and for a long time that it not our place to show people political content from accounts they don’t follow,” and that “it’s proven impractical to draw a red line around what is and is not political content.”

In a video on Instagram, he said that the push for political content — particularly from users on Threads — is “by the way, very different from the feedback we were getting only a few years ago about people feeling that they were overly exposed to political content on our platforms.” Of course, according to the Wall Street Journal, that was before Mark Zuckerberg experienced the effects of filters cutting down the reach of his post about recovering from a torn ACL and before Meta’s new and friendlier-to-Trump policy chief took over.

  • BadlyDrawnRhino
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    21 hours ago

    Wonder if they’ll be recommending content from all sides of the political spectrum, or just the right-wing content…

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      15 hours ago

      It’s sqewed in favor of the right, with non-right leaning comments being hidden in favor of those that call all LGBTQ+ people pedophiles (this predated the whole community guideline change fiasco, and was this since progressives started to hate GenAI), and in some countries, you barely get any leftist content, all while the right is being forced upon you.