FACEBOOK is reducing political content in News Feeds.
After months of tests, the tech giant has said it will be expanding the feature to more countries.
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The small test started in the US, Canada, Indonesia, and Brazil.
The move seems to have gone down well as Facebook will now expand the reduced political content policy to users in Ireland, Sweden, Spain, and Costa Rica.
The move comes after Facebook faced backlash for the amount of political content users were seeing in their Feeds.
It was also criticise for the ease at which people can spread misinformation on the platform.
Facebook said: “We’re gradually expanding some tests to put less emphasis on signals such as how likely someone is to comment on or share political content.
“At the same time, we’re putting more emphasis on new signals such as how likely people are to provide us with negative feedback on posts about political topics and current events when we rank those types of posts in their News Feed.”
However, Facebook is also facing criticism for reducing the political content.
Charlie Angus, a member of the Canadian House of Commons, has slammed what he calls Facebook’s “unprecedented power”.
He told CBC News: “When Facebook says they’re going to be having less political coverage, I want to know what does that mean practically, because if they are throttling political conversation and political information when many people coming off the pandemic are getting their information online, that could be very troubling.”
It’s currently unclear when or if the changes will come to the UK.
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In other news, Apple’s latest iOS 15 software could be released worldwide as soon as next month.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
