Instagram Limits Political Content by Default

Instagram shocked and angered many of its users but suddenly limiting political content they were allowed to post. However, users have found how to keep their political content unlimited with a few clicks. According to…

Sandra RhodesMar 25, 20242 min read

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said on Feb. 9. “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.”

“So we’re extending our existing approach to how we treat political content – we won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads,” the blog post continued. “If you still want these posts recommended to you, you will have a control to see them.”

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in a post on Threads that the goal of the policy change is “to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it.”

Dani Lever, a spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Threads, said people can certainly get more political news if they want it.

“This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted,” Lever said. “And now, people are going to be able to control whether they would like to have these types of posts recommended to them.”

This is a reversal from the 2020 Presidential Election when Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg donated money to aid people to vote.

Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan gave about $400 million to two nonprofit organizations. This money was given to help various government election offices with work and equipment including ballot drop boxes, voting equipment, additional manpower, COVID-19 protective gear for poll workers and public education campaigns on new voting methods, according to Fox News.