Meta continues to revise its moderation and content rules. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced today that Instagram and Threads will start including political content in their recommendations. This is a departure from the policy that both platforms adopted last year, when users had to choose whether they wanted to see political content or not. Now, according to Mosseri, there will be three levels of political content that Instagram and Threads users can choose to see: less, standard (which will be the default), and more.
“It has been proven that it is impractical to draw a red line around what is and is not political content,” Mosseri wrote. The changes will begin to be implemented this week in the United States, and in the rest of the world in the following weeks.
This announcement is the latest in a series of changes that Meta is making that appear to be attempts to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company will abandon the services of third-party fact-checkers in favor of a Community Notes model for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, mimicking the approach taken by X (formerly Twitter). Nick Clegg resigned as Meta’s president of global affairs and was replaced by Joel Kaplan, who has good ties to Republicans in Washington, DC.
Yesterday it was also revealed that Instagram had blocked several LGBTQ hashtags and treated them as “sexual content” for several months. The company said it was a mistake.
