Itā€™s been nearly a year since Instagram and Threads defaulted toĀ blocking recommendations of ā€œpoliticalā€ contentĀ from accounts you donā€™t already follow, butĀ now Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says, ā€œā€¦weā€™re going to be adding political content to recommendationsā€ on both platforms.

Thatā€™s a sharp turn fromĀ his statements in 2023laying out the goal of a ā€œless angry place for conversationsā€ that wouldnā€™t do anything to encourage politics or hard news. However, under Metaā€™s new approach to moderation ā€” and new rules aboutĀ what users can say on its platformsā€” 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, MosseriĀ reiterated, ā€œIā€™ve maintained very publicly and for a long time that it not our place to show people political content from accounts they donā€™t follow,ā€ and that ā€œitā€™s proven impractical to draw a red line around what is and is not political content.ā€

In aĀ video on Instagram,Ā he said that the push for political content ā€” particularly from users on Threads ā€” is ā€œby 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.ā€ Of course, according to theĀ 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 Metaā€™s new and friendlier-to-Trump policy chief took over.