Instagram moves to limit political content

Instagram has moved to limit political content, with users now having to go into their settings on the app to turn the limiting feature off.

Users of the popular social media platform now have to go into their settings under “[c]ontent preferences,” click “[p]olitical content,” and choose the option to not “limit political content from people you don’t follow,” or else Instagram will limit political content from those the user doesn’t follow by default.

Instagram announced back in February that it would no longer proactively recommend political content.

“We want Instagram and Threads to be a great experience for everyone,” a post on Instagram’s blog from last month reads. “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.”

“So we’re extending our existing approach to how we treat political content – we won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads,” the Instagram blog post continues. “If you still want these posts recommended to you, you will have a control to see them.”

In a post from over a month ago on Threads, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said the mission 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.”

Dani Lever, a spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Threads, said in an emailed statement to The Hill that the “change does not impact posts from accounts people choose to follow; it impacts what the system recommends, and people can control if they want more.”

“This announcement expands on years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted,” Lever added. “And now, people are going to be able to control whether they would like to have these types of posts recommended to them.”