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 for a small percentage of people this week” in Brazil, Indonesia and Canada, it said in a blog post 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 different ways to rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals, and then decide which approach to use in the future,” Aastha Gupta, product management director at Facebook, wrote in the statement. blog post.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the changes during the company’s earnings call last week. “One of the most important feedback we are hearing from our community at the moment is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience with our services,” he said.
The company, which has come under fire for its shortcomings in fighting election misinformation and its political advertising policies, claims that political content makes up only 6% of what people see on Facebook (FB) in the United States. When asked how it defines political content, Facebook said it will use artificial intelligence, known as machine learning, “to search for signals of political content and predict whether a message is related to politics.” The test includes news stories about politics and political messages from family and friends.

Facebook will exempt Covid-19 information from state and regional health authorities and posts from official government agencies from its political content experiment.

“It is important to note that we are not completely removing political content from Facebook,” Gupta wrote. “Our goal is to ensure that people retain the 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 from CNN Business contributed to this report.

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