Instagram users fume as app begins limiting political content

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While Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg pumped big bucks into the 2020 presidential election to help people get out and vote, his company has begun restricting Instagram users' access to political information in their feeds ahead of November's election.

Instagram appears to have changed users' algorithm settings to the default position of limiting political content – and users have been furiously reacting to the change online.

Meta announced on Feb. 9 that a change to both Instagram and Threads was in the works, saying in a press release that it no longer wanted to "proactively recommend" political content from accounts users don’t follow.

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The company said that it would effectively be restricting political content mentioning "laws, elections, or social topics" from accounts not being followed by users unless they choose to do so, although the company did not go into detail about what it meant by political content.

However, there would be no restrictions on accounts users already follow, Meta said at the time.

But the February announcement did not say that all users would be automatically switched to the default position of limiting political content – which appears to have been the case over the last