Facebook wants to reduce political content in the news feed

Zuckerberg did not elaborate on how Facebook could change the News Feed, nor did it explain how it would determine what it considers “political.” He was quick to point out that he was still committed to “free expression” and that he did not want to limit the ability of users to express political opinions, but that the company would respond to “comments” from users. indicating that political content is unpopular.

Of course, political struggles have been a mainstay of most users’ newsfeeds for much of Facebook’s 15 years of existence. And it’s unclear to what extent Facebook will be able to influence the behavior of its users – many of whom already believe the company is censoring views it disagrees with.

But it’s yet another sign that Facebook wants to lower the temperature on its platform after the 2020 election and the violence that followed in Washington DC. Facebook has been criticized for the role played by its platform in the riot on the Capitol.

Here are Zuckerberg’s full comments on political groups and content in the Newsfeed:

“As we continue to focus on this, we need to make sure that the communities that people connect with are healthy and positive. It’s something we’ve been focusing on for a while now. One way, of course, to do this is to suppress groups that break our rules against things like violence or hate speech. In September, we announced that we had deleted over a million groups in the last year alone. But there are also a lot of groups that we might 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 United States before the election. We continue to refine how it works, but now we plan to keep civic and political groups away from long-term recommendations, and expand this globally. To be clear, this is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for some time to lower the temperature and discourage conversations and divisive communities.

On a related note, we’re also currently considering steps we could take to reduce the amount of political content in the News Feed. We are still working on the best way to achieve this. And to be clear, of course, we will always allow people to participate in political groups and discussions if they wish. These can often be important and useful. They can be a means of organizing grassroots movements, speaking out against injustice, or learning from people with different perspectives. So we want these discussions to continue. But one of the main comments 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. “

Updated to add additional quotes from Mark Zuckerberg.