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Instagram and Threads will start recommending political content to users in the US.
The news comes after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would ditch its formal fact-checking program in favor of a Community Notes approach. And Meta tipped a more “personalized approach” to political content across its sites after reducing posts about elections, politics, or social issues in people's feeds since 2021.
In February, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri announced that Threads and Instagram would stop recommending political posts to "preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content while respecting each person’s appetite for it.
"From a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them," Mosseri said at the time.
That's about to change. "I’ve maintained very publicly and for a long time that it [is] not our place to show people political content from accounts they don’t follow, but (1) a lot of people have been very clear that they want this content, and (2) it’s proven impractical to draw a red line around what is and is not political content," Mosseri said this week.
By reversing its decision, Meta intends “to introduce political recommendations in a responsible and personalized way, which means more for people who want this content and less for those who do not,” Mosseri added.
The update will reflect on feeds in the US starting this week and for the rest of the world sometime next week. On Threads, users will be able to adjust their political content consumption in three modes: less, standard, and default.
Meta also plans to lift restrictions on topics like immigration, gender, and mental health, and focus more on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, Zuckerberg says.
This comes days before Donald Trump returns to the White House. Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and Zuckerberg said in a Threads post that he’d be working with the president “to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.”