Facebook announced Wednesday that it will start implementing a number of tests designed to decrease the political content seen by U.S. users in the coming weeks, according to Politico.
In a blog post, Facebook’s Product Management Director, Aastha Gupta, wrote that Facebook would be trying out several different approaches to lessen the political content seen as users scroll down their news feeds, starting in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia. The U.S.would follow several weeks later, Politico reported.
“During these initial tests we’ll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we’ll use going forward,” wrote Gupta.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January that the company would be considering ways to show users less political news on the platform, according to the New York Times. (RELATED: Facebook Will Remove Posts Connecting COVID-19 Vaccine To Autism)
“One of the top pieces of feedback we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” Zuckerberg said.
The Facebook logo seen on a phone (Photo credit ALASTAIR PIKE/AFP via Getty Images)
In the beginning, the experiments will only affect a small share of Facebook users, and content from organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, along with content from official government agencies, will be exempt, Gupta wrote in the blog post.
However, the accounts of politicians and public officials will be included in the tests, a Facebook spokesperson said in an email to Politico. (RELATED: House Oversight Chair Suggests Parler Has Ties To Russia And Requests Financing Information)
Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson, said that the company would continue “refining this model during the test period to better identify political content, and we may or may not end up using this method longer term,” according to the New York Times.