On February 9, 2024, Instagram announced that they have taken a decision towards the active promotion of political content towards the users. They stated that they want the platform to be a great experience for everyone and to maintain that their step goes towards the political content as well.
The content with political references, government names or anything that will relate to the politics will not be promoted to the feeds of the users.
How the content will be treated after the announcement.
Instagram want everyone to have an amazing experience with Threads and Instagram. Users do not want to stand in the way of users’ posts if they choose to follow accounts that share political content, but they also do not want to proactively suggest political content from accounts that users do not follow.
Therefore, they are continuing to handle political content in the same way as before: Instagram won’t actively suggest political content on recommendation surfaces on Instagram and Threads. Users will be able to choose whether or not to see these posts if they still want them recommended to them.
They way Instagram shows content to people and how they suggest it through the feed, explore, reels and suggested users will not change for the accounts they already follow. Even if an account that isn’t allowed to be recommended posts political content—possibly about legislation, elections, or social issues—its followers can still see it in Feed and Stories.
Control over user’s content
Instagram professional accounts will be able to verify through Account Status whether they are eligible for recommendations based on the political content they have recently posted. To be re-eligible for recommendations, they can edit or remove recent posts from Account Status, ask for a review if they disagree with our decision, or refrain from posting this kind of content for a while.
There will be an option for users to select whether or not to see this kind of political content on Threads and Instagram recommendation surfaces. Facebook will eventually get this control as well.
by Swapnil Angel Samad