Facebook will reduce political content in its post feed
With this measure, it will be possible to better understand the different preferences of people for political content
Facebook will control the prominence of political content on its eponymous social network and this week will carry out a test to reduce this type of publications among a limited number of users in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia, and later in the United States.
The measures of the social network, which were already advanced by Mark Zuckerberg at the end of January in the presentation of the latest economic results of Facebook, aim to “better understand the different preferences of people for political content and test various measures based in these data“, as the US company announced in a statement.
As a first step, Facebook will conduct a test to “temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in the news feed.” This measure will take place this week among a limited number of users from Canada, Brazil and Indonesia, and in the coming weeks it will also take place in the United States.
In the initial phases, Facebook will explore various ways to rank political content in its feed using signals, and will use these tests to decide the strategy to launch in the future, by surveying participating users.
Facebook has stressed that political publications will not be removed in any case, but will only try to reduce their dissemination, since users have stated that “they do not want political content to take over their news feed,” according to the company. According to Facebook analysis, 6 % of Facebook posts are considered political content in the United States.
Source: dpa
