How Facebook will limit political content
Facebook will temporarily reduce political content in users News Feed but it will not affect information about the pandemic from authoritative sources. This is a test in some countries as Facebook is trying ways to answer to users saying they don´t want political content to take over their News Feed.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the social media company would find ways of limiting political content. The efficiency of measures tested will be checked by polling users.
It’s important to note that we’re not removing political content from Facebook altogether. Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting each person’s appetite for it at the top of their News Feed.”
Over the next few months, we’ll work to better understand peoples’ varied preferences for political content and test a number of approaches based on those insights, Facebook said in a post.
“As a first step, we’ll temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in News Feed for a small percentage of people in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia and the US in the coming weeks. During these initial tests we’ll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we’ll use going forward.”
”COVID-19 information from authoritative health organizations like the CDC and WHO, as well as national and regional health agencies and services from affected countries, will be exempt from these tests. Content from official government agencies and services will also be exempt.”
Facebook said analyses show that in the US political content make up 6% of what users see on Facebook.
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