2024-08-03 03:46:45
Instagram has announced a new measure that will reduce the number of recommendations of political accounts or posts on its platform.
Meta announced that will stop recommending political content on Instagram and Threads. After years of controversy over the 2020 US elections, the company has taken an important step in this field. Starting today, its social media algorithm will not promote political posts from accounts you don’t follow.
The measure will apply to the Recommendations found in the Feed, the Explore tab, or suggested users on Instagram and Threads. According to a blog post on Instagram, the company decided to change its approach in order to offer a good experience to everyone. This feature will be optionalso if you want to see political or social posts in your feed, you just need to activate it in your user settings.
“People have told us they want to see less political content, so we’ve spent the last few years refining our approach on Facebook to reduce the amount of political content (including from politicians’ accounts) you see in Feed, Reels, Watch, and Groups,” Meta said on the Transparency Center’s website. “As part of this, we aim to avoid making recommendations that might be about politics or political topics, in line with our approach of not recommending certain types of content to people who don’t want to see it.”
Instagram stated that the update to recommendations will apply to public accounts of people classified as politicians (governors, officials, etc.). The measure will not take effect if you follow any of these accounts, as the algorithm will continue to show the content in your feed. Similarly, if you are not a politician, but you publish content related to laws, elections or social issues, your followers will be able to see it in their feed or in stories.
Instagram and Threads say goodbye to politics and Facebook is next
Meta will begin limiting political recommendations on Instagram and Threads, although they will not be the only ones. The technology company confirmed that this feature It will also be implemented on Facebook later. as an optional control.
“If you choose to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to stand between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said in Threads.
The implementation of this measure has generated mixed reactionsOn the one hand, many people celebrate that the algorithm leaves out political content, as it is one of the reasons they left Twitter. However, others consider that it is a disguised censorship that will affect the discussion of important issues.
The fundamental question everyone is asking is: What is political content for Meta? The Transparency Center’s website does not clearly define how it labels these posts. It only says that its AI systems use surveys or personalized signals to help them understand what content is informative, meaningful or worthwhile.
“Please clarify what is considered “political.” Climate change news? Vaccine and pandemic news? Human rights? There are a lot of important things going on that overlap with politics, but people still need to be aware of them,” Shauna Wright (goldengateblond) responded on Threads.
The general clamor in the nearly 900 responses to Adam Mosseri, director of Instagram, is that the platform must clarify what content will be affected. However, a significant number of users believe that It is the best alternative to maintain a toxicity-free platform and thus prevent it from becoming a new X (Twitter).
By: HIPERTEXTUAL.com