Ian Patrick, FISM News
Facebook announced that they are continuing with their plan to de-emphasize political coverage in its News Feed feature. This came as an update to their initial announcement from February 10 of this year, in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted to “turn down the temperature” of political conversations.
The initial test involved reducing “the distribution of political content in News Feed for a small percentage of people in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia” and later the United States. The social media giant reports in their recent announcement that they’ve seen “positive results” in these tests, and are expanding the tests to Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain and Ireland.
Facebook’s tests involved taking feedback from multiple users on their News Feed experience, and using that to determine a general understanding of how the populace feels about the amount of political content received.
To determine how effective these new approaches are, we’ll survey people about their experience during these tests. 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.
Facebook does acknowledge that such tests would affect viewability for some publishers, especially those who push out a lot of political content. Facebook said to understand the impact they will be “planning a gradual and methodical rollout for these tests” and will announce other tests in the future.
We’ve learned that these changes will affect public affairs content more broadly and that publishers may see an impact on their traffic. Knowing this, we are planning a gradual and methodical rollout for these tests, but remain encouraged, and expect to announce further expansions in the coming months.