By Angela Yang -
NBC News
Some content creators on Instagram who frequently post about news are urging their followers to enable "political content" on their accounts, after the social network will automatically limit these types of posts.
The network, owned by Meta, announced in February that it would stop recommending accounts that share political content to users who do not follow them.
The app typically suggests posts and accounts based on the type of content you interact with the most.
The changes began to go live without further public notice in recent weeks, and users began to notice that the new feature had been set to “Limit” as the default.
That setting excludes content that is “likely to mention governments, elections, or social issues that affect a group of people and/or society at large” from the platform's discovery mechanisms.
Some users expressed surprise because, they say, they were not directly notified of the configuration change, but rather learned about it from other users.
This past weekend some creators began circulating instructions showing how to manually toggle the option by opening the “Settings & Privacy” menu in the top right corner of the app, navigating to “Content Preferences,” and looking for the “Political Content” tab. ”.
This setting also applies to the user's Threads account.
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“You can't just blindfold people who may not realize it.
“A lot of people don't even know that this is something that has been applied to their preferences,” said Johanna Toruño, a street artist who frequently advocates for Palestinians on her Instagram account, where many of her more than 156,000 followers found her organically. .
“I find it so appalling to do something like that at such a political moment in our lives, not only internationally, but also within our country,
being an election year,” she added.
The move comes at a time when Instagram has emerged as a popular source of unfiltered news and updates on global and national political issues.
A Pew Research Center study published in November found that 16% of American adults regularly access their news through Instagram, which represents a larger share of users' news diets than the social networks TikTok or X.
But since launching its Threads app last year, Meta has made clear its intention to stop promoting political content on its platforms.
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“This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted,” Dani Lever, Meta’s director of public affairs, wrote in an email statement on Sunday.
“And now, people will be able to control whether they want these types of posts recommended to them,” he added.
Adam Mosseri, director of Instagram, has also reiterated that he does not see Instagram or Threads as spaces for politics and news.
Meta networks have been criticized in previous years for being an unreliable source of political content, especially as
generative artificial intelligence makes the risk of viral disinformation more acute than ever.
“Politics and hard news are important, I don't want to imply otherwise,” Mosseri wrote in a Threads post in July.
“But my view is that, from a platform's perspective, any engagement or incremental revenue they can generate is absolutely not worth the scrutiny, negativity (let's be honest), or integrity risks that come with it,” he said.
Political activists have previously accused Meta of possible bias against their content, and users expressed suspicions that this worsened in the months following the Palestinian group Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel.
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After some celebrities and
influencers
accused the platform in October of “
shadow banning,
” or essentially censoring, their content in support of Palestinians, a Meta spokesperson issued a statement about an error. global that affected the reach of
stories
that reposted other stories,
reels
or publications.
Around the same time, the company apologized for “inappropriate Arabic translations” that resulted in Instagram incorrectly adding “Palestinian terrorists” to the English translation of certain descriptors in user bios.
Later that month, Meta blocked several large pro-Palestinian Instagram accounts, saying its security staff had detected a possible hacking attempt.
The latest change to the Instagram app is reminiscent of another feature the platform added in December, in which users automatically saw less verified content in their feed unless they changed the settings.
Its quiet launch had sparked similar outrage, causing pro-Palestinian accounts to express suspicions that Instagram was censoring their content by default.
(It is unclear whether pro-Palestinian posts are fact-checked more than others.)
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Samira Mohyeddin, a journalist based in Canada, said that a few weeks ago she started noticing that all the historians and political commentators who usually appeared in her Instagram recommendations were suddenly replaced by videos of cats and influencer
couples
.
“As much as we like to belittle social media and say it's a bottomless sewer and all that, it's still a vital source of news and information for many people around the world,” said Mohyeddin, who shared his post on how to do it .
News influencer
and
lawyer Katie Grossbard said she is concerned that Instagram's new limits on political content will prevent users from staying up to date on issues related to the US presidential election.
“The complicated thing about this news is what is defined as political?
Because I think everything is political.
Our lives are political,” Grossbard said, “this decision directly harms communities whose entire existence is political.
And is there any difference between publishing content about non-partisan election dates, publishing about a court case that affects reproductive freedom, and publishing a post with slides about trans history?
The complicated thing is, what is defined as political?
Because I think everything is political.
“Our lives are political.”
Katie Grossbard INFLUENCER AND LAWYER
But this ease of access to information in digestible chunks has also made social media platforms prone to spreading disinformation unchecked.
Before the 2020 election, Meta (then Facebook) removed 50 Instagram accounts linked to a Russian-backed campaign.
And now, with the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence rapidly advancing, fake images and videos known as
deepfakes
pose a growing risk of infiltrating the information ecosystem.
As attention spans shorten, Grossbard said, many voters are increasingly turning to sharable graphics on Instagram rather than taking the time to watch TV news or read a long article.
“While we can all try to improve it and maybe get better education on how to read, understand and interpret the news in schools, where we are is where we are,” he said, “I think, especially in an election year, we have to come to people where they are so they can feel educated, empowered and want to participate.”