You may have noticed less political content on your Instagram and Facebook feeds this year — and that’s by design. Specifically, it’s the design of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who, according to The New York Times on Tuesday, wants his platforms to be less politically charged heading into the 2024 election.
“On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured,” the Times reported. “App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates.”
Rather than political coverage, Meta’s apps are now more likely to recommend sports, cooking and celebrity news.
That’s a stark change from four years ago, when Meta — then still under its original Facebook name — hit users with political news more frequently. The company, at the same time, actively policed content tied to the Trump-Biden election, as well as COVID-19. In mid-2020, Facebook started putting warning labels on posts from politicians and public figures that it deemed misinformation; the company also expanded its “hate speech” policy at the time.
Zuckerberg, in the year leading up to the 2020 election, said he was “very focused on election security“; the company changed its rules around political ads, making it so American political advertisers had to have a U.S. address, for example.
Facebook also had 40 teams, including an “election security” team, that partnered with Homeland Security, law enforcement and state and local election officials to oversee how the election was presented on Facebook and Instagram. That’s become less of a concern for Zuckerberg this time around.
For instance, Zuckerberg no longer meets with his heads of election security on a weekly basis, the NYT reported, adding: “He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team … though the company says the election integrity workers were integrated into other teams.”
Facebook was also active on the political front in the months after the 2020 election. Most notably, the company “indefinitely” banned Trump, saying the risk of having him on the platform was “simply too great” after the January 2021 Capitol Riot (Facebook and Instagram lifted all restrictions on Trump in July).
One reason to expect Meta’s shift away from politics to continue: it hasn’t hurt business. The company’s stock price has nearly doubled since Election Day 2020, and is up 63% on the year to $564 per share.
Leave a Reply