Facebook will start showing some of its users less political content

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The social media platform “will temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in the news feed for a small percentage of people” in Brazil, Indonesia and Canada this week, he said in an article on Wednesday. blog. The changes will be applied to a limited number of US users in the coming weeks.

“During these initial tests, we will explore various ways to classify political content in people’s flows using different signals, and then decide which approaches we will use in the future,” wrote Aastha Gupta, Managing Director. products at Facebook, in the blog post.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the changes during the company’s earnings call last week. “One of the main comments we are hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” he said.
The company, which has been criticized for its shortcomings in tackling electoral disinformation and its political advertising policies, says political content is only 6% of what people see on Facebook (FB) in the USA. When asked how it defines political content, Facebook said it will use artificial intelligence known as machine learning “to look for signals of political content and predict whether a post is politically related.” . The test will include reports on politics as well as political posts from family and friends.

Facebook will exempt information about Covid-19 from national and regional health authorities as well as publications from official government agencies from its experience of political content.

“It is important to note that we are not completely removing political content from Facebook,” Gupta wrote. “Our goal is to preserve people’s ability to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting everyone’s appetite for that content at the top of their news feed.

– Kaya Yurieff of CNN Business contributed to this report.

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