Facebook tweaks news feed to reduce political content

Social media giant Facebook rolled out its news feeds with less political subject with an aim to reduce provocative content on its platform, as announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The prominent social network said it would start testing the change “for a small percentage of people” in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week, and the United States in the coming weeks.”

“During these initial tests, we’ll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we’ll use going forward,” said Aastha Gupta, product management director.

“As Mark Zuckerberg mentioned on our recent earnings call, one common piece of feedback we hear is that people don’t want political content to take over their News Feed,” Gupta added.

The change will not alter any information about the COVID-19 pandemic and content from global health organisations or official government agencies. “Over the next few months, we’ll work to better understand peoples’ varied preferences for political content and test a number of approaches based on those insights,” she said.

The decision comes with Facebook and other platforms were criticised for facilitating political misinformation and manipulation, especially during election time.

Last month, Zuckerberg said that Facebook is seeking to “turn down the temperature” on its sprawling platform by lowering the kind of divisive and inflammatory political talk it has long hosted.

He said the social media giant will no longer suggest politics-themed groups to users and was working on ways to reduce the amount of political content served up in users’ news feeds by its automated systems.

“We’re still going to enable people to engage in political groups and discussions if they want to,” Zuckerberg added.