Despite promises to the contrary: Facebook continues to recommend political groups


Facebook apparently still recommends political content to its users – despite promises to the contrary by Mark Zuckerberg. This is suggested by research by the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and the US research collective The Markup.

Just a year ago, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg announced that political groups should no longer be automatically recommended to users on Facebook. In the USA, the platform had already temporarily stopped these recommendations during the US elections in autumn 2020. In addition, Facebook had stopped accepting political ads seven days before the US election.

In the run-up to the 2021 federal election, SZ and The Markup examined the influence of Facebook algorithms on user feeds to check whether Zuckerberg is keeping his promise. To do this, they selected 1,000 German Facebook users who are representative of all Germans. The subjects installed an app that opened Facebook several times a day in the background and read out data on public posts, groups and ads.

The result of the research: Users on Facebook continued to receive recommendations from political and sometimes radical groups, including on conspiracy ideological content. Groups that clearly belong to a party were also recommended – sometimes even on the day of the federal election. So Facebook’s algorithms don’t seem to filter thoroughly enough.

A meta spokeswoman confirmed to the SZ that there were problems with group filtering in these cases. But Meta would continuously improve the filtering. Facebook provided a similar response in February 2021, when US Senator Ed Markey requested an explanation for the platform’s continued endorsement of political groups during the US election period. The senator was reacting to research by The Markup, which served as a model for the SZ project.


(gref)

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