Instagram quietly introducing a ‘political’ content preference and turning on ‘limit’ by default is insane?wrote another X user named Matt in a post with nearly 40,000 views.Instagram apparently did not notify users directly on the platform when this change happened.
Instead, Instagram rolled out the change in February, announcing in a blog that the platform doesn’t
want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow. That post confirmed that Metawon’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads, so that those platforms can remaina great experience for everyone.
For general Instagram and Threads users, this change primarily limits what content posted can be recommended, but for influencers using professional accounts, the stakes can be higher. The Washington Post reported that news creators were angered by the update, insisting that Meta’s update diminished the value of the platform for reaching users not actively seeking political content.
Ashley Belanger
I don’t see this particular setting in my Instagram account – I’m on Android and in the EU, both circumstances that may delay the rollout – but adding a very consequential switch and selecting a default without informing users feels very disingenuous. It’s fairly obvious why Meta is doing this, to eschew scrutiny over their moderation choices for political posts and hide behind flimsy justifications that its users don’t want to see political stuff, but their vague definitions of ‘political’ and these underhand tactics may draw more attention to Meta’s practices. It may also be a negotiating tactic against news organizations, to further reduce their reach and traffic, and then claim that people don’t want news on Meta’s platform.
Leaving aside that societies shouldn’t let corporations decide what counts as ‘political speech’ and how much reach and with whom that speech is allowed, what I find odd about this product choice is that Threads is linked to Instagram. These are quite different mediums and people would naturally develop other behaviors, consume diverse content, follow different people. Personally, I would like to limit this nebulous political stuff on Instagram, where I’m only interested in photos anyway, and allow it on Treads, and I think a lot of people would prefer it that way. This is probably a technical limitation, as Threads accounts were initially linked to Instagram, but it makes no sense going forward to have the same set of moderation rules and personal preferences on two very different social networks. Meta seems to still be overcautious with Threads, but without allowing it more room to breathe, grow, and evolve into something unique, Threads will never achieve Twitter’s level of influence and cultural awareness.
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