Instagram and Threads have stopped recommending political content

Instagram revealed on Friday that both Threads and Instagram will no longer actively recommend political content.

In a press statement, the social networking site stated, “We want Instagram and Threads to be a great experience for everyone.”

It continued, “If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow.”

Political content will not be recommended by sites that offer user-generated content suggestions, such as explore, reels, in-feed recommendations, and suggested users, unless users modify their settings to allow it.

Instagram emphasized that this won’t change the way users see material from profiles they follow.

Instagram said, “If political content — potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics — is posted by an account that is not eligible to be recommended, that account’s content can still reach their followers in Feed and Stories.”

The intention of the policy change, according to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, is “to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it,” as he stated in a post on Threads.

Mosseri similarly stressed that they were not seeking to “do anything to encourage” politics and hard news on the platform following Threads’ the introduction last year.

Mosseri declared in July of last year that ““Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise.” “But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them,” the author states.