Tech giant Facebook revealed it will “explore” ways to reduce political content on people’s news feeds.
“Over the next few months, we’ll work to better understand peoples’ varied preferences for political content and test a number of approaches based on those insights,” the social media company wrote in a Wednesday blog post. “As a first step, we’ll temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in News Feed for a small percentage of people in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week, and the US in the coming weeks.”
“During these initial tests we’ll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we’ll use going forward,” the post continued.
In late January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed user complaints about too much political content on the website.
“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,” he said during a conference call. “A lot of the feedback that we see from our communities [is] that people don’t want that in their experience.”
According to Facebook, an average 6% of a user’s feed represents political content.
The platform banned former President Donald Trump from the website following backlash from the Jan. 6 riot where thousands of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol resulting in five deaths, including one police officer. Following the riot, Facebook ramped up its removal of followers of the right-wing conspiracy theory, QAnon, in addition to those making posts with the phrase “stop the steal,” a reference to unverified claims that the 2020 presidential election was wrongfully bent in favor of President Biden.
The social media giant began its removal of QAnon followers last October. At the time, a Facebook spokesperson said the move was meant to “bring to parity what we’ve been doing on other pieces of policy with regard to militarized social movements.”
Weeks before the November election, Facebook banned political advertisements on the platform. The company extended its prohibition through the month of November and into December as deliberations continued about ballot results. The decision drew criticism from tech watchdogs and others.
“If Facebook and Google are truly incapable of reviewing and safely running Georgia Senate ads without opening the floodgates of paid disinformation across their platforms, it’s a damning indictment of their own business model,” Nicole Gill, executive director of tech policy advocacy group Accountable Tech, said. “These companies are already failing to curb the viral spread of conspiracy theories designed to delegitimize our elections. As has always been the case, deceptive organic content — boosted by toxic algorithms – continues to drive social media’s disinformation crisis; not paid content. Preventing campaigns from running ads to inform Georgians about how and why to participate in these critical runoff elections is actively harmful to democracy.”
