Following what it describes nearly as good results after months of tests, Facebook has announced that it’s expanding its reduction of political content in News Feeds to hide users in additional countries. The move follows a comparatively small test with some Facebook users within the US earlier this year, marking the arrival of comparable changes for users in Ireland, Sweden, Spain, and Costa Rica.
Facebook has faced heavy criticism over the political content found on its platform, primarily the large mass of misinformation, disinformation, and similar media readily shared across the social network. Though the corporate has taken steps to deal with a number of these issues, critics have argued that the corporate hasn’t done enough, which remains a severe source of faux News for several users.
On February 10, the corporate announced that it had been taking steps to scale back the quantity of political content in users’ News Feeds. It said thanks to feedback from users who were uninterested in those posts they were seeing. the corporate spent subsequent few months testing these tweaks, including small users within the US, Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil.
In an update on the matter published today, Facebook said it’s expanding these changes to Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain, and Ireland, as well. As a part of its update, Facebook explained:
… we’re gradually expanding some tests to place less emphasis on signals like how likely someone is to discuss or share political content. Instead, at an equivalent time, we’re emphasising new signals like how likely people are to supply us with feedback on posts about political topics and current events once we rank those sorts of posts in their News Feed.
Facebook notes that some publishers may even see changes in their traffic because the reduced political content spreads to more users.
