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Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg: Political groups should no longer be recommended to users
Photo: OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP
Facebook apparently wants to reduce political communication on its platform.
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that the company no longer wants to recommend any groups to its users on political issues.
Facebook had not made such recommendations for some time in the USA: In the recent presidential election campaign, the company wanted to stay out of the heated political dispute over the White House.
Facebook now wants to expand this measure to the whole world, said Zuckerberg.
With this, the group wants to help "calm down" and curb political communication, which is divisive.
The groups on Facebook bring together users who have common interests and views - sometimes extremists also come together.
In September, Facebook announced that it had removed more than a million groups within a year for violating the network's rules.
Zuckerberg said there are also many groups that Facebook may not want to encourage its users to join.
Less political content for the news feed?
Facebook's reputation has suffered in recent years as its platforms have been used to deliver misleading, manipulative and extremist political messages.
Facebook was also heavily criticized in the wake of the storm on the US Capitol.
Managing director Sheryl Sandberg had initially downplayed Facebook's role in organizing the protests.
In the United States, Facebook has come under massive criticism in recent weeks because Donald Trump and supporters of the former president had spread the false claim via the company's networks that the election of the new President Joe Biden over Trump was due to fraud.
In the course of such messages, the Facebook group blocked Trump's pages in the network and in the Instagram service, which also belongs to the company, but only temporarily.
It has not yet been decided whether Trump's accounts should be permanently deleted.
Facebook has passed this decision on to the new oversight board, a kind of »supreme court« for Facebook.
Zuckerberg also announced that Facebook was considering reducing the amount of political content being fed into users' newsfeeds.
However, users should continue to be able to participate in political groups and discussions on the Group's platforms, he said.
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mbö / dpa
