In January 2021leoxplay philippines, after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new priority for Meta: He wanted to reduce the amount of political content on the company’s apps, including Facebook and Instagram.
As the United States hurtles toward November’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan appears to be working.
On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And political misinformation is harder to track on the platforms after Meta removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor the sites.
Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, no longer meets weekly with the heads of election security as he once did, according to four employees. He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team, these employees said, though the company says the election integrity workers were integrated into other teams. He has also decided not to have a “war room,” which Meta previously used to prepare for elections. Instead, Meta said it will be running an election operations center closer to the November vote. The company ran that center during the presidential debates and primaries.
Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee laying out how he wanted to distance himself and his company from politics. The goal, he said, was to be “neutral” and to not “even appear to be playing a role.”
“It’s quite the pendulum swing because a decade ago, everyone at Facebook was desperate to be the face of elections,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook.
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