Users of Instagram will no longer have to be annoyed with recommended political content as the Meta-owned application has stopped recommending political content to its users. While this news was confirmed by Instagram’s boss, Adam Mosseri, he also mentioned that users following specific political pages will continue receiving such suggestions.
If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow,
explained the meta-owned platform in a lengthy post.
These recommendation updates apply to public accounts and in places where we recommend content, such as Explore, Reels, In-Feed Recommendations, and Suggested Users; it doesn’t change how we show people content from accounts they choose to follow.” further stated in the blog post about the newly introduced update.
Nevertheless, amid the political scenario in India, this might negatively affect influencers who became popular for their politics-based content.
If political content—potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics—is posted by an account that is not eligible to be recommended, that account’s content can still reach their followers in Feed and Stories.
Besides, this recent change by Meta is an approach to preventing thread users from discussing problematic content that can lead to social media political conflicts. In addition to it, the company also demotes content related to “vaccine” and “COVID,” further restricting political and hard news.
Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content while respecting each person’s appetite for it.
Mosseri, Instagram’s boss, concluded in the blog post.
On the contrary, these updates were discouraged by users and creators who were actively engaged in the content. Nevertheless, on Instagram and in threads, suggested professional account admins can use the “account status” feature to check whether their content passes the eligibility criteria to be available for recommendations.
In the same blog post, the meta-owned platform announced the introduction of this feature on Facebook at a later date.
