Facebook to reduce political content in users’ News Feed

“This is a continuation of work we’ve been doing for a while to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversations,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook CEO also added that the company would permanently halt algorithmic recommendations for groups dedicated to political and social issues.

However, it was not specified exactly how Facebook may tweak News Feed, or detail how it would determine what it considers “political.”

Ahead of the US presidential election 2020, Facebook stopped recommending civic and political groups to its users.

 

Check out Zuckerberg’s full comments on political groups and content in News Feed:

“As we continue to focus on this, we need to make sure the communities people connect with are healthy and positive. That’s something we’ve been focused on for a while now. One way of course we do that is by taking down groups that break our rules against things like violence or hate speech.

In September, we shared that we had removed more than 1 million groups in the last year alone. But there are also a lot of groups that we may not want to encourage people to join, even if they don’t violate our policies.

For example, we stopped recommending civic and political groups in the US ahead of the elections. We’re continuing to fine-tune how this works, but now we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term and expand this globally.

To be clear, this is a continuation of work we’ve been doing for a while to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversations and communities.

Along these same lines, we’re also currently considering steps we could take to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed as well. We’re still working through exactly the best way to do this. And to be clear, of course, we’ll still enable people to engage in political groups and discussions if they want to.

These can often be important and helpful. They can be ways to organize grassroots movements, speak out against injustice, or learning from people with different perspectives. So we want these discussions to keep happening. But one of the top pieces of feedback we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services.”