Meta is trying to distance itself from politics

It’ll soon be easier to avoid seeing political content on Instagram or Threads – unless that’s your thing. Meta on Friday announced plans to stop proactively recommending political content from accounts that users don’t follow on Instagram or Threads.

• The policy, which mirrors what Meta currently uses on Facebook, marks the first details of how Instagram and Threads will handle political content ahead of the November election.

Background: Since its mass adoption in the mid-2000s, social media has played an important role in every single US presidential election. Barack Obama is widely credited as the first major candidate to utilize social media during his successful 2008 campaign, while Obama and Mitt Romney each actively campaigned online in 2012.

Social media’s impact on the ballot box continued to grow in 2016 and 2020, and has included a pair of Facebook-related controversies:

• In 2016, consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected the personal data of ~87 million US Facebook users without their consent and used it to help the campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, eventually resulting in a record-high $5 billion fine for FB.
• The 2020 election saw Facebook and Twitter (now X) take steps to prevent the sharing of a New York Post article allegedly containing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, even though the article and its contents were later proven authentic by the DOJ.

Looking ahead: Experts say Meta’s new approach to political content is expected to decrease the amount of political posts shown to users in general. After Facebook initiated the same policy in 2021, the share of political content users saw in their feed fell from 6% of all posts to less than 3% over the next year.

🕺📱As if on cue... President Biden officially joined TikTok over the weekend in a bid to connect with younger voters.