Facebook says it is expanding its “less political” News Feed test to 75 new countries, for a total of more than 80
Facebook is slowly expanding its effort to weed out political content from News Feed. The company is now testing its “less political” feed in 75 new countries, Facebook said in an update. Source: About Facebook .
Context & Ripple Effects
What started in February as a small experiment in Canada, Brazil, Indonesia and the US has become a global default-in-waiting: Facebook is scaling its reduced-political-content feed to 75 more countries, taking it past 80 markets in under a year. The company framed the original test as an emphasis shift toward personal stories, but the speed of this rollout suggests the results were strong enough to treat as a product direction rather than an experiment.
The expansion lands on top of an existing two-track structure. Since 2019 Facebook has run a separate, curated Facebook News tab built around select general, topical, diverse and local publishers — meaning the company can demote politics out of the main feed while still hosting news in a walled-off surface it controls.
First-order effects
- News publishers in 80+ markets face a sharp cut in organic referral traffic as political content is demoted from the main feed, with no guarantee their stories qualify for the curated News tab instead.
Second-order effects
- Publishers are pushed harder toward Facebook's curated surfaces and formats it controls, shifting leverage over distribution and monetization further to Facebook; the parallel test of a full-screen video player replacing the News Feed compounds the squeeze on text-and-link publishers in those same international markets.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the main feed becomes a personal-entertainment surface while civic and news content is confined to separately governed tabs — making Facebook the arbiter of what counts as 'political' across most of its footprint, a definitional power that regulators and election officials will increasingly have to engage with directly.
The trend: Major social platforms are splitting civic content off into curated, separately moderated products while optimizing the default feed away from news entirely.