in World News Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Hides Political News Before Election in Favor of Celeb Gossip, Cat Videos
by Lucas Nolan
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been reducing the prominence of political content on its platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads leading up to the November 2024 election. Zuckerberg believes what Americans really need before the most important election of their lives is even more celebrity gossip and animal videos.
The New York Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, has been implementing changes to distance itself from the contentious world of politics as the 2024 U.S. election approaches.
Users of Facebook, Instagram and Threads have noticed a decrease in the visibility of posts related to political campaigns and candidates. This is no accident, as Meta has deliberately adjusted app settings to de-emphasize such content in users’ feeds. Additionally, the company has removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers previously relied upon to monitor political misinformation on the platforms, making it more challenging to track the spread of false or misleading information.
Breitbart news as reported extensively on Meta’s move away from politics. As early as 2021, Zuckerberg’s empire was making moves to reduce the visibility of top political pages, many of which are conservative:
The success of conservatives on Facebook has long been a complaint of Democrats and the establishment media. During the 2020 election, the New York Times ran a piece lamenting the fact that conservative pages like Breitbart News, the Hodge Twins, Dan Bongino, and Dinesh D’Souza regularly outperformed liberal rivals on the platform.
Recent data from Facebook’s own analytics service showed that Breitbart News continues to demolish its establishment media competitors on Facebook.
Facebook’s move away from political content will hurt the most successful political publishers on the platform while boosting news publishers that can afford to create large quantities of non-political content — like the corporate establishment media.