Facebook says it plans to start limiting political content on the platform

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Facebook, the terrible platform you hate but continue to look at, has said in a new blog post that it plans to limit the amount of political content it shows its users.

This could have been really great like six months ago, but screw that, right? Anyways, this is just the latest move from the company regarding politics. First, it started limiting political ads and tested promoting “reputable” news sources, and now it is testing out an overall reduction of political content.

It’s still in its early stages and Facebook notes that it will only be tested on a limited number of users in Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia this week. For those in the US, the test is still weeks away and will still be a small rollout.

“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,” notes Facebook.

It goes on to say that COVID-19 information from sources like the CDC and WHO will be exempt from these tests.

It will be interesting to see how this works and if actually makes a difference. Personally, I’ve noticed Facebook’s algorithm changing nearly daily depending on what is going on the world.

For example, during the Capitol riots, my Facebook was dead set on showing me meme posts from days prior. But on other days, random, typically sad, news overtook my feed. Not just from news organizations I actively follow, but from threads my friends had commented on or liked.

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