With less than 24 hours to go before presidential candidates former President Donald Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden face off in Atlanta for their first 2024 debate, Instagram reportedly quietly limited users’ ability to view political content on the platform.
An alleged error blocked Instagram users' ability to view recommended political content on the platform even if they specifically opted to see it, reported Kyle Tharp of the For What It’s Worth Substack newsletter.
Regardless of whether or not a user opted in to find recommended political content in their Instagram feed, several users discovered that Instagram automatically opted users out of seeing these recommendations once they closed the app, Tharp wrote on Wednesday.
The error occurred just days before users were expected to share video clips of the debate on the Meta-owned platform, causing concern among critics, according to Tharp.
Link to original video here.
Meta Communications Director Andy Stone responded to several complaints about the suspicious mishap in a Threads post, claiming: “This was an error and should not have happened. We’re working on getting it fixed.
Instagram announced its controversial decision to reduce political content on the platform in a February blog post. “We want Instagram and Threads to be a great experience for everyone,” Instagram wrote in the blog. “If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and your politics, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow.”
The social media platform added, “So we’re extending our existing approach to how we treat political content – we won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads.”
Although the move sounds harmless, the decision automatically forces users to opt out of default censorship, rather than allowing users to opt in, with political free speech remaining the platform’s norm. The controversial move also makes it harder for political content creators to organically grow their Instagram pages and for prospective viewers to decide for themselves whether or not they want to follow that page’s political content.
It is unclear what caused Instagram to suddenly and automatically opt its 2.4 billion active users out of receiving political recommendations, but Meta has a documented history of election-interfering censorship.
For example, it is documented that Meta-owned Facebook blocked Trump ads on its platform during the 2020 presidential election and Facebook insider Zack McElroy stated that 75 to 80 percent of all censored content on the platform came from conservative accounts.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Instagram at +1-833-422-1450 or (650) 543-4800, and demand it be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on political speech. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
