Instagram, Threads no longer recommending political content

Instagram and Threads will no longer proactively recommend content about politics, Instagram announced Friday.

“We want Instagram and Threads to be a great experience for everyone,” the social media platform said in a press release. 

“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,” it added.

Places that recommend content to users, such as explore, reels, in-feed recommendations and suggested users, will not recommend political material unless people change their settings to allow it. 

Instagram emphasized this will not affect how users are shown content from accounts they 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 noted.

Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said in a post on Threads that the goal of the policy change is “to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it.”

After the launch of Threads last year, Mosseri similarly emphasized they were not looking to “do anything to encourage” politics and hard news on the platform. 

“Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise,” Mosseri said last July. “But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.”