Facebook is responding to feedback from users complaining about the amount of political content they see on the social network. The company has announced that it"s about to begin tests on how to reduce the political content that shows up on the News Feed, which is the main page you see when opening Facebook.
Starting this week, a small subset of users in Brazil, Canada, and Indonesia will start seeing less political content on their feeds, and over the next few weeks, that will expand to the United States. Facebook will then test a variety of different approaches to how it should rank political content in the News Feed by testing different signals. Facebook will be sending out surveys to its users to measure the effectiveness of its different approaches during the testing period.
Exempt from these tests will be content regarding the COVID-19 pandemic when posted by official agencies and entities, both national and regional. Content from official state agencies and services will also be unaffected. And, naturally, political content isn"t being removed from Facebook altogether, and users can still choose to engage with it in groups or pages they visit.
These tests will likely take some time, and so most users around the world will likely have to wait for any changes to their own experience. Regardless, this should be good news if you"ve felt like political content has negatively impacted your time on Facebook.