Facebook Continues to Reduce Political Content on Its News Feed With New Measures
Expanding tests into more countries.
After months of testing, Facebook has now announced the continuation and expansion of its efforts to reduce political content on users’ News Feeds.
Measures to achieve this were first announced and introduced back in February, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted the increasing criticism against the company for allowing political content to take over its feeds. Tests to curb this were launched initially in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia, followed shortly by the U.S. Now, Facebook is also expanding coverage over to Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain and Ireland.
“We’ve also learned that some engagement signals can better indicate what posts people find more valuable than others,” says Facebook. Using this data, the platform is looking to now place “less emphasis on signals such as how likely someone is to comment on or share political content” and instead focus on “how likely people are to provide us with negative feedback on posts about political topics and current events when we rank those types of posts in their News Feed.”
The social network also acknowledged that these features will likely affect publishers within the public affairs genre more, and so any new tool will be rolled out gradually and methodically in the future.
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