Facebook going less political on feed

Facebook is expanding a test that aims to reduce the amount of political content in the News Feed. The company says it's seen "positive results" in reducing this content for some users in a few countries, according to an update to a February blog post. Costa Rica, Sweden, Spain, and Ireland are now part of a test of the strategy.

In February, Facebook began testing its politics-reduction features with some users in Canada, Brazil, the United States, and Indonesia. It later announced that it would prioritise "inspiring and uplifting" posts and provide more ways for people to express what they don't like explicitly rather than letting Facebook infer it from their behaviour.

According to the facebook blog, "We’ve also learned that some engagement signals can better indicate what posts people find more valuable than others. Based on that feedback, 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."