Instagram and Threads will stop recommending political content

By Jess Weatherbed , a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

It’ll soon be easier to avoid seeing political content across Instagram and Threads unless users explicitly choose to have it recommended to them. In a blog post published on Friday, Meta announced that it’s expanding an existing Reels policy that limits political content from people you’re not following (including posts about social issues) from appearing in recommended feeds to more broadly cover the company’s Threads and Instagram platforms.

“Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it,“ said Instagram head Adam Mosseri, announcing on Threads that the changes will be applied over the next few weeks. Facebook is also expected to roll out these new controls at a later, undisclosed date.

Users who still want to have content “likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large” recommended to them can choose to turn off this limitation within their account settings. The changes will apply to public accounts when enabled and only in places where content is being recommended, such as Explore, Reels, in-feed recommendations, and suggested users. The update won’t change how users view content from accounts they choose to follow, so accounts that aren’t eligible to be recommended can still post political content to their followers via their feed and Stories.

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