“Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri wrote.

Is politics a major buzzkill? Instagram execs seem to think so.

In a blog post Friday, Instagram, the popular photo and video app owned by Meta, said it will no longer “proactively recommend” political content from accounts that users do not already follow. The same policy applies to Threads, the Twitter-copycat app launched last summer under the Instagram brand.

“We want Instagram and Threads to be a great experience for everyone,” it said. “If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow.”

By default, going forward Instagram and Threads will not promote political content (unless it’s from accounts users already are following). Both apps will add a setting to let users who still want to see political content recommendations opt to do so — and, according the post, the same control will roll out on Facebook at a later date. Instagram defines “political content” as “potentially related to things like laws, elections or social topics.”

  • @taiyang
    8•10 months ago

    Y’all, it’s just about the recommendation system. It’s not like they are banning politics or politicians (I’m looking at you, X), and you must understand the feed is already dominated by boosted garbage anyway (especially after they added reels). People already hate and generally ignore things from people they don’t follow.

    That said, I avoid IG ever since I did a part time job running accounts, and that shit was soul crushing. I just don’t like folks acting like everything is a conspiracy on Lemmy-- this ain’t 4chan. IG really just needs a better recommendation algorithm, ideally one focused image sharing (although that enshittification ship has sailed).