If you’re the type of person who likes going on Facebook for updates on friends and not the latest political discourse, your news feed might have seemed like a dumpster fire the past few years. The social media giant says that one of the constant complaints they got from users is that there’s too much political content on their feed and so earlier this year, they started testing that out in the US, Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia. Now they’re planning to expand this experiment to Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain, and Ireland.
The past years have seen a lot of political debates raging on social media, particularly on Facebook. So the company decided to try and “listen’ to signals from users so that they will reduce the political content showing up on their news feed. When they first rolled it out, they promised to conduct more research so they can listen to actual users and what they think about what’s working or not when it comes to content on their feed.
They’re also expanding tests based on engagement signals that determine the algorithm in showing or lessening political content. There is now less importance on how likely a user shares or comments on political content and more emphasis on how likely people provide negative feedback on posts about political and current events. They are expecting the level of misinformation to lessen with these changes, well if the algorithm will be able to detect and de-empathize political content,that is.
However, these tests will most likely affect news organizations and content providers who rely on heavy traffic from the social network to their websites or platforms. Political campaigns will also have to come up with new strategies to reach their target market on Facebook if there will be a significant decrease in political content for those who want to see more pictures of their friends’ kids or pets rather than have another debate on the latest, burning issue.
Facebook promises that the rollout of the tests will be “gradual and methodical” to take these things into consideration. However, we should expect further expansions of the experiment in the next few months.
