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)_/¯
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”.
So if you turn that setting off, I assume your timeline is completely overtaken by alt-right propaganda and boomer memes. This is Facebook (er… Meta) after all.
I think this is a great thing. Algorithm-driven political content recommendations are a major reason why the US is so divided right now. If we reduce the amount of political content people see online (for everyone on the political spectrum) then I think that’s a great way to combat division. The upcoming election shitshow won’t be as bad if people aren’t constantly seeing content online designed to enrage them.
I have seen trans creators in IG reporting that they are being filtered by this setting, so that’s not great.
Were they posting things re laws related to gender? If yes, maybe Instagram treated those as political and maybe those content didn’t reach many folks – due to the limit setting discussed in the article.
No, mostly just regular posts, meta just decided that being trans is “political”.
