FACEBOOK is trialling showing less political content on News Feeds.
The tech giant revealed the test in a recent blogpost and said it will start in a few countries before spreading out further.
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The blog states: “Over the next few months, we’ll work to better understand peoples’ varied preferences for political content and test a number of approaches based on those insights.
“As a first step, we’ll temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in News Feed for a small percentage of people in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week, and the US in the coming weeks.”
Facebook clarified that official COVID-19 information and posts from actual government agencies would be exempt from the test.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned on Facebook’s recent earnings call that he knew people wanted to see less political content on their News Feed.
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The test will aim to workout the best way to rank political content.
It will also survey users on their experience.
Facebook added: “It’s important to note that we’re not removing political content from Facebook altogether.
“Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting each person’s appetite for it at the top of their News Feed.
“Based on our analyses in the US, political content only makes up about 6% of what people see on Facebook.
“And although each person’s News Feed is different, we know even a small percentage of political content can impact someone’s overall experience.”
So, users will still be able to see political content but it shouldn’t take over their News Feed.
Facebook also has to tackle issues regarding misinformation and ‘fake news’, which could be exacerbating the problem.
Facebook’s biggest cyber-security mistakes
Here’s some of the major times Facebook let us down…
- In 2007, Facebook’s first targetted advertising product, Beacon, caused outrage because there was initally no opt-in option about the kinds of information users wanted to share
- In 2009, a Federal Trade Commission investigation was triggered because Facebook users complained that the new privacy tools were too confusing and pushed users to make more of their personal information public
- In 2010, it was revealed that advertisers were using a privacy loophole to retrieve revealing personal information about Facebook users and the company had to change its software
- In 2011, the FTC charged Facebook with lying to customers about how their information could be kept private but making it public anyway
- 2018 saw Facebook’s biggest privacy scandal to date with reports that Cambridge Analytica misused user data and Facebook had to admit that it had failed to protect its users
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Do you see a lot of political content on Facebook? Let us know in the comments…
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
