It’s been nearly a year since Instagram and Threads defaulted to blocking recommendations of “political” content from accounts you don’t already follow, but now Instagram boss Adam Mosseri says, “...we’re going to be adding political content to recommendations” on both platforms.
That’s a sharp turn from his statements in 2023laying out the goal of a “less angry place for conversations” that wouldn’t do anything to encourage politics or hard news. However, under Meta’s new approach to moderation — and new rules about what users can say on its platforms— that goal is going out the window just as the Trump administration prepares to take over.
Until now, users have had to opt-in to seeing recommendations of content deemed political, but the change rolling out this week in the US and to the rest of the world next week will turn on the recommendations and a content control setting available with options for less, standard (the default setting), and more.
In a series of Threads posts, Mosseri reiterated, “I’ve maintained very publicly and for a long time that it not our place to show people political content from accounts they don’t follow,” and that “it’s proven impractical to draw a red line around what is and is not political content.”
In a video on Instagram, he said that the push for political content — particularly from users on Threads — is “by the way, very different from the feedback we were getting only a few years ago about people feeling that they were overly exposed to political content on our platforms.” Of course, according to the Wall Street Journal, that was before Mark Zuckerberg experienced the effects of filters cutting down the reach of his post about recovering from a torn ACL and before Meta’s new and friendlier-to-Trump policy chief took over.
That was the Internet. People using only AOL or something (I'm born in 1996, so not sure) would apparently not be called Internet users.
It's the same with Facebook and co now, except they squatted on our free communication space. So they managed to pretend there's nothing else in the Internet.
Can still have the old thing. Things needed for everyone to use it as intended - hosting and connectivity and naming and authentication solutions. Hosting and connectivity - no-configuration distributed storage of data from your webpage or whatever, solutions to NAT traversal not requiring user configuration (think old Skype). Naming - that's centralization by definition, but still points of failure can be limited to names signed by some identity provider that doesn't have to be online. Authentication - that'll have to be cryptographic identities, so what's lost is lost. But one can make a convenient for the user "inheritance" operation, of grabbing everything signed by a certain identity to clone it (while obviously a new identity, can be used in case of losing the old one).
I guess somebody would have already done this.
There's Fediverse. There's federated or selfhostable messaging. There's a multitude of selfhostable solutions for everything. There are people's personal websites. It just cannot be killed off by its very nature.
Not good enough due to fragmentation and amount of steps. Attention economy, remember. No attention resource to bother with something manual for a specific person.
80’s kid here…
We cannot go back to anonymous users calling each other names. People went way too far down the “my feelings are hurt and you’re going to jail” path. There’s no going back to “if you don’t like it go somewhere else” like it used to be.
There is, it just has to be more convenient, hence the listed functionality.