Facebook plans to downrank current events content and political posts in the News Feed, after users approved of tests that limited such content
AxiosSara Fischer
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook had already made political distribution a target: Zuckerberg said it would stop recommending civic and political groups, while global ranking tests asked users which News Feed posts they valued. The reported downranking turns that feedback-driven testing into a broader feed-design choice.
The move also follows Facebook’s uneven treatment of news quality, including a push to favor original reporting after rolling back a post-election boost for authoritative outlets. It matters because News Feed ranking determines which publishers and political voices receive routine distribution.
First-order effects
Political posts and current-events material will receive less News Feed distribution, reducing immediate reach for the publishers, groups, and creators that rely on those posts.
Facebook shifts the feed toward the content users rated more favorably in its ranking tests, making user-feedback signals more consequential for what appears in News Feed.
Second-order effects
News organizations and political publishers face stronger incentives to compete for attention with less political or breaking-news-oriented material, rather than relying on News Feed visibility.
Facebook’s earlier effort to privilege original reporting becomes less central to publishers’ distribution if current-events posts as a category are shown less often.
Third-order effects
If Facebook sustains the approach, News Feed ranking moves from calibrating the quality of news and political content toward limiting those categories’ overall role in the product.
The pattern points to a platform-governance model in which user-preference research is used to justify lower algorithmic amplification of civic material.
The trend: Facebook is shifting News Feed from selectively ranking civic content to reducing the category’s default distribution based on user-feedback testing.
@deaneckles There is a clear PR appeal for this product solution, since it has come up so many times post-2016: Burn it with fire and make all the bad go away. And it gives the appearance of being value-neutral and user-driven when it is anything but.
I am extremely skeptical of this change. User surveys, which tend to ask ungrounded hypotheticals about “politics”, elicit negative responses. This is due to a combination of social desirability bias, differing definitions of politics & stereotypes about politics on social media.…
Whatever you think of this particular policy change, it's nice to see Facebook acknowledge that what people engage with isn't synonymous with what they value. Let's see if that idea catches on more broadly. https://www.wired.com/...
Facebook plans to de-emphasize politics in the news feed. The move could reduce traffic to news publishers, particularly ones that post a lot of political content. https://www.axios.com/...
@deaneckles True, those surveys exist, but you are making an assumption that this is the research driving these decisions. From what I saw, it was not. Instead Facebook (and other companies too) are more than willing to look towards poorly designed research that confirms a pre-ex…
The end result will be more junky engagement bait spam that asks you about your first car or where you met your spouse in an attempt to figure out your password recovery questions. And this will come at the expense of important breaking news and ability to mobilize for good.
5/ In short, this will make the existing problem worse because: a) it punishes good information just as much as it punishes bad information; b) the asymmetry means the right-wing/junk sources will fill any gaps; c) calcifies an existing problem and makes harder to fix. great.
@nicole_bonoff I'm going on old info & public reports, but these per-story questions have partially been determining feed ranking for some time... I'd be surprised if this is based on questions that ask generically about political content. Maybe good for journalists to follow up …
We've seen positive results from our tests to address the feedback we've received from people about wanting to see less political content in their News Feed. As a result, we plan to expand these tests to Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain and Ireland. https://about.fb.com/...
When you ask users to evaluate the political content that actually appears within their social media apps, they love it! Of course, that generates its own set of problems. This change reads to me as abdicating responsibility for addressing misinfo, harassment, radicalization, etc
Didn't they make some big show a while back about prioritizing friends/family posts in the News Feed? So, did the de-emphasizing at that time apply to everyone else (read: local news) but not these political “news” pages that were driving FB engagement through the roof? https://t…
Make no mistake, this is 100% happening because conservative political pages are the most engaged on their platform. Knew this was going to happen eventually because libs have been complaining about conservative success on the platform nonstop since Trump won in 2016.
like the solution is so simple here, folks. Why punish ALL news publishers for posting legitimate political news when you could just......bury the posts that promote political misinformation/hateful speech.
They would never be deranking political content if NYT and WaPo were at the top of the engagement charts. But in reality, their content is bland and boring and it flops on social compared to sites like Fox News, Daily Wire, and The Blaze. It's not our fault you're bad at content.
Mark my words: this policy will disproportionately - if not exclusively - impact conservative users and content. Facebook has historically used vague terms like “political content” to disguise what they are actually doing: censoring information they deem unfavorable. https://twit…
something tells me this won't extend to the meme pages sharing images about marxist microchip vaccines and fake “biden fell asleep during meetings” videos https://twitter.com/...
1/ I'm not sure this is a good thing for a few reasons... a) For starters, FB isn't good at defining political. For example, daily wire has spent over 10M on ads this year alone. But FB political ad library says they have spent 800k on political/social ads since 2018. C'mon! http…
Facebook's algorithm just continues to get worse. Crazy concept: if people go out of their way to like pages with political content, let them see the content they are seeking. https://twitter.com/...
i thought the whole argument was that the feed fact checked the feed, that the good information from reputable sites would outweigh the shady awful stuff.... https://twitter.com/...