In a move users are calling “embarrassing” and lacking “courage,” Instagram and Threads head Adam Mosseri announced that the platforms will be recommending political content to users once again.
“As per @zuck’s post yesterday about free expression yesterday [sic], starting this week in the US, and rolling out over the coming week to the rest of the world, we’re going to be adding political content to recommendations on @Threads and adjusting the political content control to three options: less, standard, the default, and more,” Mosseri said on a post on Threads, referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Tuesday announcement that the social media giant is getting rid of its fact-checkers.
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“I’ve maintained very publicly and for a long time that it not our place to show people political content from accounts they don’t follow, but (1) a lot of people have been very clear that they want this content, and (2) it’s proven impractical to draw a red line around what is and is not political content,” Mosseri continued. “Our intention is to introduce political recommendations in a responsible and personalized way, which means more for people who want this content and less for those who do not. Our plan is to continue to listen to feedback, learn, and iterate over the next few months. Thank you for your patience.”
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As Mosseri noted, this comes just two days after Meta, the company that owns Instagram and Threads, announced it is replacing fact-checkers with Community Notes, along with lifting prohibitions against some discriminatory and hateful rhetoric on its platforms. Within these new guidelines, women can be called property, ethnic groups can be called “filth,” and gay people can be called “mentally ill,” for instance.
Many human rights organizations (and many users) point out that this move suspiciously comes as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to rules the next political administration. Trump has continuously attacked content moderation, insisting it silences conservative voices. Rights groups argue that conservative voices aren’t being moderated — hateful voices are. This kind of language fuels real-world violence; Meta cut a line from its policy that acknowledged that connection.
This is a pretty stark reversal from Meta’s March 2024 approach to politics on the app: none. At the time, there were mixed reactions at the move away from political content on Threads and Instagram. People saw the reasons Meta might choose to move away from politics: Social media sites have been rife with misinformation and disinformation during past elections, and Meta’s response to these egregious mistakes — making political content rarer on its platforms — made sense. But, at the same time, a platform like Threads was seemingly built to replace the once beloved, pre-Elon Twitter — a platform that thrived on political discussion (however annoying they might have been) and real-time news.
At the time, many of the people frustrated at Meta’s pullback relied upon a combination of fact-checkers and community notes to keep the news accurate and helpful. With this new decision, that isn’t part of the equation. And with an upcoming administration creating a political minefield around content moderation and misinformation, those missing guardrails will likely leave a significant hole in the way we consume and evaluate the decisions our government makes.