It looks like Instagram’s New Year’s resolution is to be more toxic. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and its Twitter clone Threads, says the platforms will be “adding political content to recommendations” going forward—just in time to generate rage bait engagement at the start of the second term of the Donald Trump presidency.
In a post on (where else?) Threads, Mosseri said the company will be shifting away from its opt-in requirement for users to see political content. Instead, political content will be recommended by default, and users will have the ability to adjust the fire hose with three different settings options: less, standard, and more.
The shift—which follows Mark Zuckerberg and his Gen Z bro curls telling the world that fact-checking will no longer be a thing on Meta platforms—is a decided departure from how Threads has operated since its launch and how Instagram has operated since, well, ever. In 2023, Mosseri insisted that Instagram would not “do anything to encourage” political content or hard news on its platforms because the controversy isn’t worth the “incremental engagement or revenue.”
Oh, how a couple of years and an election changes things. It’s no secret that posting across Meta platforms has been declining for several years now—so much so that the company is turning into an AI slop factory to juice its numbers and increase user engagement. Since that has produced a general sense of outrage, the company is pulling a page from the Elon Musk playbook: fewer rules, less enforcement of those rules, and more rage in the machine.
And really, you’ve gotta marvel at the timing of the decision to flip the Discourse switch. The company spent the entire 2024 election cycle not just ignoring political content but actively squashing it in the algorithm. An investigation from the Washington Post found that users who included the word “vote” on posts saw a 60% decrease in engagement, and organizations like the Human Rights Campaign saw their audiences shrink over the election season.
And that was for relatively innocuous stuff like participating in democracy and supporting equality. An investigation from The Markup found that when it came to content related to the genocide in Gaza, Meta platforms demoted posts, deleted captions, hid comments, suppressed hashtags, and ignored moderation appeals.
But now that the election is over and Trump—who Zuckerberg called “a badass,” joined for dinner at Mar-a-Lago, and donated $1 million to his inauguration fund—readies to take office again, it appears he’ll have another friendly platform for his administration. If nothing else, Trump has proven to be great content, and Meta needs the juice.