One of the common observations we hear is that people don't want political content to dominate their news feed, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said at a recent earnings meeting.
Based on these observations, over the next few months, we will work to better understand people's diverse preferences about political content, and test a number of methods based on those statistics, Asta Gupta, Facebook's executive director of product management, said on the company's blog.
"We will act temporarily and as a first step to reduce the distribution of political content in (the latest news) to a small percentage of people in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia this week, and the United States in the coming weeks," he added.
"During these preliminary tests, we will explore various ways to arrange political content in people's feeds using different references, and then decide which methods we will use in the future," he continued.
According to Gupta, information on Corona virus from reliable health organizations such as the World Health Organization, as well as national and regional health agencies and services from the affected countries, will be exempt from these tests.
Content coming from official government agencies and services will also be exempt.
To determine the effectiveness of these new methods, Facebook will poll people’s opinions about their experience during these tests. “It is important to note that we do not completely remove political content from Facebook .. Our goal is to preserve the ability of people to find and interact with political content on Facebook, while respecting the desire of And everyone's preferences. "
According to Gupta, based on analyzes in the United States, political content makes up only about 6% of what people see on Facebook.
Although news feeds vary from person to person, we know that even a small percentage of political content can influence someone's overall experience.
"We already provide controls to help you manage what you see in (Latest News), such as (Favorites) tools, that allow you to specify the people and pages you want to prioritize in (Latest News); and a service to temporarily hide posts from a person, page, or group," he added. ", And the ability to turn off political ads; but we are always trying to improve (latest news), and this means finding a new balance for the content, which people want to see."