People don't want politics on their Facebook timeline: Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook has announced that the social networking site would no longer recommend politics-themed groups to its over 600 million users.

Addressing an investor call on Q4 2020 earnings, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said, "There are a lot of groups that we may not want to encourage people to join, even if they don't violate our policies. For example, we stopped recommending civic and political groups in the US ahead of the elections. We are continuing to fine-tune how this works, but now we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term, and expand this globally."

Zuckerberg said the decision to tone down politics-related recommendations was based on user feedback.

He also said that the new changes will apply globally to the social network.

Addressing an investor call on Q4 2020 earnings, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said, "There are a lot of groups that we may not want to encourage people to join, even if they don't violate our policies. For example, we stopped recommending civic and political groups in the US ahead of the elections. We are continuing to fine-tune how this works, but now we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term, and expand this globally."

Zuckerberg said the decision to tone down politics-related recommendations was based on user feedback.

He also said that the new changes will apply globally to the social network.

"We are also currently considering steps we could take to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed as well. We are still working through exactly the best way to do this. And to be clear, of course, we'll still enable people to engage in political groups and discussions if they want to. These can often be important and helpful. They can be ways to organize grassroots movements, speak out against injustice, or learning from people with different perspectives. So we want these discussions to keep happening." 

"But one of the top pieces of feedback we are hearing from our community right now is that people don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services," Zuckerberg added.

"We are also currently considering steps we could take to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed as well. We are still working through exactly the best way to do this. And to be clear, of course, we'll still enable people to engage in political groups and discussions if they want to. These can often be important and helpful. They can be ways to organize grassroots movements, speak out against injustice, or learning from people with different perspectives. So we want these discussions to keep happening." 

"But one of the top pieces of feedback we are hearing from our community right now is that people don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services," Zuckerberg added.