After initially pledging not to recommend civic and political groups to its users, but then sort of continuing to do that anyway, Facebook once again affirmed its commitment to reducing the amount of political content that users see on Wednesday.
During a fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doubled down on the company’s commitment to ramping down political content on the platform in the wake of an attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, saying that the policy was a “continuation of work we’ve been doing for a while to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversations.”
“One of the top pieces of feedback that we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” Zuckerberg said.
During testimony he gave to Congress in October 2020, Zuckerberg had claimed that Facebook had already stopped recommending all “political content or social issue groups” to its users in an effort to minimise political discord ahead of the contentious presidential election that was, at the time, just around the corner. An investigation published by The Markup on January 19 subsequently found that — surprise! — the platform had in fact continued to recommend political groups to its users throughout the month of December. Even more damningly, the investigation concluded that a number of the groups shown to Trump supporters had included posts explicitly calling for political violence, which is sort of not ideal, given the current state of things.
In addition to clamping down on recommended political groups, Zuckerberg also confirmed on Wednesday that the company is also brainstorming ways to reduce the amount of political content that users see in their News Feeds on a daily basis.