Instagram creators who frequently post about news and politics are urging their followers to allow “political content” in their feeds after the platform began automatically limiting such posts.
The Meta-owned platform had announced in February that it would stop recommending accounts that share political content to users who don’t already follow them. The app typically suggests posts and accounts based on the type of content a user engages with most.
As changes began quietly taking effect in recent weeks, users began noticing that the new feature had been set to “Limit” by default. That setting excludes content that is “likely to mention governments, elections, or social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large” from the platform’s discovery mechanisms.
Some on the app expressed feeling blindsided that they were not directly notified of the setting change, only learning of it from other users.
Over the weekend, some creators started circulating instructions showing users how to manually toggle the option back by opening the “Settings and activity” menu at the top right corner of the app, navigating to “Content preferences” and finding the “Political content” tab. These settings also apply to the user’s Threads account.
“You can’t just essentially put a blindfold on people who may not realize it. A lot of people don’t even know that this is a thing that’s been applied to their preferences,” said Johanna Toruño, a street artist who frequently advocates for Palestinians on her Instagram account, where many of her more than 156,000 followers found through organic discovery. “It’s just so appalling to me to do something like this at such a political moment in our lives, not just internationally, but also within our country, with this being an election year.”
The move comes at a time when Instagram has emerged as a popular source of news and unfiltered updates around global and domestic political issues….
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