Insta­gram rolls out hid­den set­ting that lim­its polit­i­cal con­tent

Insta­gram users caught on to what some said was a secre­tive roll­out of a pol­i­cy to stop rec­om­mend­ing polit­i­cal con­tent on its plat­form or on its Threads plat­form.
The app fol­lowed in the foot­steps of its par­ent com­pa­ny, Meta, which has been lim­it­ing polit­i­cal posts across its oth­er plat­form, Face­book, since Feb. 9. Meta claimed to have received feed­back from users request­ing to see less polit­i­cal con­tent. It sim­i­lar­ly will not rec­om­mend accounts of politi­cians to users.
The pol­i­cy now defaults to lim­it­ing polit­i­cal con­tent, which many users said was not made clear ini­tial­ly. Insta­gram promised that “if you decide to fol­low accounts that post polit­i­cal con­tent, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proac­tive­ly rec­om­mend polit­i­cal con­tent from accounts you don’t fol­low.” Its announce­ment includ­ed a screen­shot of the set­tings page where users could switch their a …