Facebook has announced a new experiment which will see it de-emphasize political posts and updates about current events in user feeds, in response to ongoing user feedback. Facebook will also limit the amount of political content that people see in their News Feeds, which could have a transformative impact on broader engagement – both on and off the platform itself.
As reported by Axios:
“Moving forward, Facebook will expand some of its current News Feed tests that put less emphasis on certain engagement signals, like the probability that a user will share or comment on a post, in its ranking algorithm. Instead, it will begin placing a higher emphasis on other types of user feedback, like responses to surveys.”
As Axios notes, the move is an extension of the experiment Facebook launched earlier in the year which has seen it reduce the amount of political content in some user News Feeds.
That test was developed in response to concerns about the impacts of divisive political debates on the platform, and Facebook has been running the experiment with ‘a small percentage of users’ in the US since February 17th.
Now, Facebook says, it has enough data to suggest that this is potentially a viable path forward for development.
“We’ve seen positive results from our tests to address the feedback we’ve received from people about wanting to see less political content in their News Feed. As a result, we plan to expand these tests to Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain and Ireland.”
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