Zuck Wants You Distracted: Instagram, Threads to Stop Recommending Political Content

Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram and Threads will no longer recommend political content on their social media platforms, the company announced on Friday. Zuckerberg’s latest move to control the national conversation will include attempting to quiet down the popular Breitbart News Instagram account.

“If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow,” Instagram announced in a Friday press release.

The Meta-owned social media platform suggested that this change is being made because, “We want Instagram and Threads to be a great experience for everyone.”

Instagram added that the change is also an extension to “our existing approach to how we treat political content.”

“We don’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads,” the company said. “If you still want these posts recommended to you, you will have a control to see them.”

The areas of Instagram that will be affected by this change are Explore, Reels, In-Feed Recommendations and Suggested Users, the social media platform said.

Instagram added that this will not affect how users are shown content from accounts they have chosen to follow.

“If political content — potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics — is posted by an account that is not eligible to be recommended, that account’s content can still reach their followers in Feed and Stories,” Instagram explained.

The company also noted that professional accounts will be able to “check their eligibility to be recommended based on whether they recently posted political content,” and are encouraged to “edit or remove recent posts, request a review if they disagree with our decision, or stop posting this type of content for a period of time,” if they want to be “eligible” for recommendation again.

Instagram concluded by stating that users who still want to see political content on their recommendations will have to utilize a control on their account that will allow them to see it. The company added that the same control will be rolled out for Facebook at a later date.

As Breitbart News previously reported, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced last summer that Facebook’s X/Twitter clone, Threads, would would not “encourage” hard news and politics, claiming that the social media platform was an app for users who are interested in a “less angry” environment.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.