Instagram users taken aback by Meta’s restrictions on political content (including “social topics”)،
It's been over a month since Meta announced it would stop recommending political content and users are furious.
Ars Technica reports that Instagram users started complaining about X/Twitter after discovering that Meta had started limiting recommended political content by default.
In February, when the announcement was made, Meta said:
We want Instagram and Threads to be a great experience for everyone. If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don't want to come between you and their posts, but we also don't want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don't follow. We are therefore expanding our existing approach to how we treat political content: we will not proactively recommend political content on the Instagram and Threads recommendation surfaces. If you still want these posts recommended to you, you will have a control to see them.
Fast forward to the present day. Many users are complaining about this on X/Twitter and are not happy that their accounts are set to limit such posts by default:
Instagram implemented a new “limit political content” feature in Settings and made it default for tons of accounts. The timing of this feature seems very suspicious to me, but here's how to fix it pic.twitter.com/wPofpiFwZk
– Michaela Okland (@MichaelaOkla) March 22, 2024
“Political content may mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and society as a whole,” reads the Instagram settings page for these types of posts. Even if you're tired of politics and just want to see another red cat/dog/panda video, the “…or social issues that affect a group of people…” part is extremely vague and could encompass… well, everything. change the setting and don't let Meta's algorithm decide what is a political post (and what isn't) that you should or shouldn't see, users can go to Instagram's menu for “settings and activities” in their profiles and update their “content preferences”. There is a “Political Content” menu (the last item under a list of “suggested content”) where users can set their preferences for what content is recommended in their feeds.
Choosing “do not limit” means “you might see more political or social topics in suggested content,” the app says. By default, all users are set to “limit,” which means “you may see fewer political or social topics.”
This affects suggestions in Explore, Reels, Feed, Recommendations, and Suggested Users. This does not affect the content of the accounts you follow. This setting also applies to Threads.
