Back in February, Facebook said that it would “temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in News Feed” for some users in Canada, India, Brazil, and the U.S. On Tuesday, the company said that these tests had “positive results.”
As a result, we plan to expand these tests to Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain and Ireland.
We’ve also learned that some engagement signals can better indicate what posts people find more valuable than others. Based on that feedback, we’re gradually expanding some tests to put less emphasis on signals such as how likely someone is to comment on or share political content. At the same time, we’re putting more emphasis on new signals such as how likely people are to provide us with negative feedback on posts about political topics and current events when we rank those types of posts in their News Feed.
The change was first reported by Axios.
People already don’t see that much political news in their Facebook feeds, we found in our analysis last year.
But if Facebook is switching its emphasis from outward-facing signals of engagement (the number of shares and comments a post gets) to inward-facing ones (users reporting individual posts or turning them off), the result could be fewer hyperpartisan stories in News Feeds racking up “angry” reactions and fueling hate reads. It could make politics discussion on Facebook a little bit more boring and a little bit less toxic.
It seems as though the changes may already be underway in the U.S.
While Facebook has been working hard to discredit it, the composition of this list has been changing…a lot recently?
Probably a combo of summer news cycle, Rumble/Gettr sapping some right-wing engagement, and ______. (Feel free to fill in the blank in my DMs, FB employees!) https://t.co/RT52HvfFdV
— Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) August 24, 2021
But Facebook never reveals how it defines “political,” and who knows which publishers will end up hurting the most.
Watch carefully to see what this actually means, especially as we know what has been categorized as politics by FB before (i.e. climate change, racism, religions other than Christianity, etc) https://t.co/QTW6zxZzQV
— Sara Lang Gifford (@SaraLang) August 31, 2021
This is terrifying because Facebook to often defines anything involving marginalized people as “political” https://t.co/rB8wlQt9aD
— 🗽Sydette Cosmic Dreaded Gorgon 🇬🇾 (@Blackamazon) August 31, 2021
