Facebook will test reducing political content in Brazil, Canada and Indonesia

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Wednesday, February 10th, Facebook announced that it will lessen the amount of political content posted to ‘a low percentage of people’ in a test in Brazil, Canada and Indonesia starting this week.

“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,” the social network said in a statement.

Brazil is among the countries where people most report viewing much political content on Facebook and this is one of the reasons why the country is taking part in the pilot.

Facebook did not offer examples of what it considers political content, but said that official government agencies and services posts will not be affected.

The pilot project will also study how people perceive and define posts related to the topic, according to sources.

The test will be extended to users in the United States in the coming weeks, but the network has not reported how long the changes will be maintained in each country.

The company stated that people who take part in the tests will be asked about their experience in using the network with less politically related content, but emphasized that the topic will not completely vanish from the feed.

The initiative had been announced by the social network’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the presentation of the company’s financial report. At the time, he also disclosed that the platform would stop recommending political groups to its users.

“One of the main reactions we get from our community is that people don’t want politics and bickering to take over their experiences in our services,” the executive said.

“Of course, taking part in debates and political groups will always be possible, for those who want to,” he added.

Facebook says that, based on U.S. data, political content represents only 6% of what people see on the social network.

However, a survey by the company in October 2020 showed that the majority of pages with more engagement (likes, comments and shares) addressed these issues.

Social networking algorithms focus on more engaging content, mainly because they keep people on the apps longer, a valuable measure to boost revenues.

During the whole of last year, the company raised almost US$86 billion in revenues and reached more than US$29 billion in profits, an increase of 58% compared to the same period in 2019.

The positive results were achieved despite a boycott by some brands, which called for tougher measures against the spread of hate and racist content on the platform.

Source: G1