This is the best summary I could come up with:
Instagram users have started complaining on X (formerly Twitter) after discovering that Meta has begun limiting recommended political content by default.
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.”
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 change also came amid speculation that Meta was “shadowbanning” users posting pro-Palestine content since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, The Markup reported.
“Our investigation found that Instagram heavily demoted nongraphic images of war, deleted captions and hid comments without notification, suppressed hashtags, and limited users’ ability to appeal moderation decisions,” The Markup reported.
On X, even Instagram users who don’t love seeing political content are currently rallying to raise awareness and share tips on how to update the setting.
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I don’t use Instagram, but I also don’t want any politics in my cereal, so that would be fine here.
Personally I wouldn’t be affected by this since it only affects recommendations, but the issue is that Meta gets to decide what is “political”.
Nearly everything has a political component to it, and this can be an excuse for hiding content that the company doesn’t want as many people to see. Activism for example is “political”.
Having the option to set the flag would be nice for those who want a filtered feed. I’m just suspicious I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I see nothing wrong in this.
The potential issues:
- this was enabled for everyone by default instead of being opt-in
- It’s hard to tell what will be blocked by this. “Activism” is political. Calling out tech oligopolies is “political”, and by extension advertising the fediverse could be “political”. This could be an easy way to hide content that harms Meta or its partners.
- It encourages users and content creators to avoid controversial topics. It’s hard to fix issues in our communities if we don’t talk about them
The fact that Meta is doing this makes me suspicious. Here in Canada, they booted off news organizations and now instead of reputable organizations sharing what’s happening, that niche is filled by other… content.
I personally try to avoid any suggested content and only use my subscriptions. For those who want to change it back:
change the setting, users can navigate to Instagram’s menu for “settings and activity” in their profiles, where they can update their “content preferences.” On this menu, “political content” is the last item under a list of “suggested content” controls that allow users to set preferences for what content is recommended in their feeds.
There is one good side. While we can’t see the algorithms used to classify content as “political”, creators can check their own status and publicize issues:
Meta’s blog noted that “professional accounts on Instagram will be able to use Account Status to check their eligibility to be recommended based on whether they recently posted political content. From Account Status, they can edit or remove recent posts, request a review if they disagree with our decision, or stop posting this type of content for a period of time, in order to be eligible to be recommended again.”
This is a huge red flag and people who are initially pleased to read this should take pause.
Meta are getting to decide what content you hide from you based on their definition of politics and enabling this for users by default (many users will never change this setting). Their definition of what constitutes as “politics” will not be one shared with a regular person.
They didn’t “boot” news sites. News sites got a law passed that completely broke the internet by requiring sites to pay for the privilege of doing them the service of linking to their news content. You can’t pretend they’re stealing from you by displaying the content you explicitly ask them to display, then also say they’re fucking you over by not displaying your content in response to you claiming that linking to it is stealing from you.
The only issue with this (outside of the fact that it’s still on a Facebook service, which means it’s impossible for it to be justifiable to use) is that the setting isn’t “zero” instead of “limited”.
This should have been communicated.
Other than that its a good thing in my book!
