Facebook will start showing some of its users less political content

Facebook will start showing some of its users less political content

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The social media platform “will temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in the News Feed to a small percentage of people” in Brazil, Indonesia and Canada this week, it said in a blog on Wednesday. The changes will be applied to a limited number of US users in the coming weeks.

“During these initial tests, we will explore a variety of ways to classify political content in people’s feeds using different signals and then decide which approaches we will use in the future,” wrote Aastha Gupta, Facebook’s director of product management, at blog post.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested the changes during the company’s earnings conference call last week. “One of the main comments we are hearing from our community now is that people do not want politics and struggle to take ownership of their experience in our services,” he said.
The company, which has been criticized for its deficiencies in combating electoral misinformation and its political advertising policies, says that political content represents only 6% of what people see in the Facebook (FB) in the United States. When asked how it defines political content, Facebook said it would use artificial intelligence known as trained machine learning “to look for signs of political content and predict whether a post is related to politics”. The test will include news on politics, as well as political posts from family and friends.

Facebook will exempt Covid-19 information from national and regional health officials, as well as posts from official government agencies from its political content experiment.

“It is important to note that we are not removing political content from Facebook entirely,” wrote Gupta. “Our goal is to preserve people’s ability to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting each person’s appetite at the top of their news feed.”

– Kaya Yurieff of CNN Business contributed to this report.

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