Prevent Big Tech from Filtering Politics on Instagram. Take Control Now!

In the throws of the 2024 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, social media giant Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, has taken steps to suppress political content on its platforms.

The new feature rolled out earlier this year prevents any content flagged as “political” from being recommended to users on Instagram.  Posts “about laws, elections, or social topics” will not not be displayed in any of the platform’s curated recommendation systems, which drives a significant amount of follower growth for platforms.

The company claims the filter is not meant to limit the exposure of any candidate or publisher specifically, and is instead meant to insulate users from politically charged content in general. “Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said.

According to Pew Research, half of all American adults got their news from social media – last year 30% of all American adults consumed news on Facebook at least “sometimes” and 16% got their news from Instagram.

The filter was automatically implemented for all accounts by default, and has to be manually disabled by each user.

In order to disable the filter, you’ll need to go to your profile page and tap the icon on the uppermost right to open “Settings and Activity.” From there, you’ll need to scroll down to the “what you see” section, where you’ll find “content preferences.” Click “political content,” and then you’ll need to select the “don’t limit political content from people you don’t follow” option.

As of now the feature does not appear to have been implemented on Facebook, which is still the most popular platform for online news. The Daily Wire has historically been one of the top publishers on the platform – last year it was revealed that officials from the Biden administration pressured Meta to redirect traffic away from right-leaning outlets, and specifically singled out The Daily Wire as a site they wanted to censor.

The policy has been criticized as overly broad – the filter is applied to all accounts by default and has to manually be disabled. Meta has also been criticized for limiting voter access to information about candidates and causes during an election year.

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has taken a strong anti-censorship stance since it was purchased by Elon Musk in 2022, and it is the fifth most popular platform for consuming news among the social media giants, after Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and controversial Chinese-owned TikTok, which is set to be banned in the United States early next year if parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell it.

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