Facebook to dial back political content on platform

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post on Wednesday that the company is looking to lessen the amount of political content users see on their platform. 

“[O]ne 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 in a Facebook post. 

Users will still be allowed to join political pages or join movements, but the political content popping up in users’ main news feed will be reduced. 

Zuckerberg did not explain how Facebook plans to implement this directive. Facebook did cut back on political content during the election season. Recommendations for political groups or pages will lessen on the platform. 

“We have to balance this carefully because we do have deep commitment to free expression,” Zuckerberg said on a call with investors, Axios reported. “If people want to discuss [politics] or join those groups, they should be able to do that. But we are not serving community well to be recommending that content right now.”

The call also emphasized that despite all the criticism Facebook gets with politics, politics takes up less than 6 percent of a user’s news feed. 

Facebook has recently received blowback, along with other social media platforms, for banning former President Donald Trump indefinitely from their website after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.