Facebook will reduce the amount of political content on its news feed due to negative user feedback, a move that could hurt news publishers and those that post about politics, according to reports Tuesday.
The social media giant will reduce political content by not relying so heavily on its content engagement algorithm, which focuses on the likelihood that a user will share or comment on a post based on past behavior, Axios reported.
It will also start to experiment with limits on how much political content people outside of the United States will see on their news feeds, including countries such as Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain, and Ireland.
Facebook announced in February that it would look into ways to reduce political content on the platform to better meet the needs of users, it said. According to the company, an average of 6% of a user’s feed represents political content.
“There has been this trend, I think, across society where a lot of things have become politicized and politics has kind of had a way of creeping into everything,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a conference call in January. “A lot of the feedback that we see from our communities [is] that people don’t want that in their experience.”
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User feedback surveys taken by Facebook show that people liked the changes to reduce political content from the news feeds of users in the U.S., Brazil, Canada, and Indonesia.
Instead, users are likely to see more content related to their family, friends, and other topics of interest outside of politics.
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For many months last year and this year, Facebook also banned political and social ads from running on its platform in the U.S., which upset some political organizations and candidates, who warned of restrictions to political speech and transparency.
