As the election cycle heats up, Instagram and Threads will be cooling down the amount of political content entering many users’ feeds.
These changes, which limit the reach of political content from accounts users don’t already follow, are enacted by default.
If you’re already wondering how to get that kind of content back into your feed, you can follow our guide on changing Instagram’s political settings here.
Threads will host, but not “amplify” news, per remarks from its head Adam Mosseri’s last year.
And what posts and topics will Instagram actually deem to be political?
It’s election season in the U.S., and Instagram has changed the way that it recommends political content.
But the platforms won’t proactively recommend content about politics, which could limit users’ ability to learn about political issues from people outside of their existing circles.
Plus, Instagram’s definition of political content is a bit broad — it describes political content as anything “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics.”If these changes bother you, you can adjust your settings to override Instagram’s political content filters.
Changing Instagram’s political content settingsIf you don’t want Instagram to filter out political content from your feed, here are steps to opt out of these changes.
Limiting political content is going to have a ripple effect.
Threads, the Twitter-like app from Instagram, is rolling out its “trending now” feature widely to all users in the U.S.
Trending topics are available on the search page and in the app’s For You Feed.
The feature is somewhat limited, as Threads only display five trending topics at a time, while X shows you multiple.
It’s possible that Threads may be limiting the number of trending topics to prevent issues around safety and spam.
During President Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this month, Threads’ trending topics were dominated by political chatter.
Meta’s newest app Threads, a would-be Twitter/X rival, may not want politics on its platform, but it’s coming to the app anyway — or so Threads’ search trends indicate.
And with the expansion, it seems the topics that Threads users are talking the most are, in fact, political in nature.
In 2016, the company made a change to Facebook’s Feed, to prioritize posts from family and friends over news.
Creators who post about laws and legislation, elections or other political and social issues, were not happy about this change.
But there’s one area where Threads isn’t (yet) suppressing politics, and that’s in its Trends feature.
The fact is that they are rich ideologues announcing their intent to pay any politician who will advance their agenda, whatever that politician’s other views.
That tech is more important than people is fundamental to their approach.
For instance, supporting politicians who oppose basic civil rights just because they have a more hands-off tech regulation proposal.
In the first place, the idea that this one issue is non-partisan is risible.
They can’t expect us to believe that their understanding of lobbying and politics is this naive.
