Facebook To Limit Politics, Boost Friends, Says Spokesman On ‘Meet The Press’
Fighting back after a whistleblower’s damning testimony earlier this week before a Congressional committee, Facebook spokesman Nick Clegg said on NBC’s Sunday Meet The Press that changes are coming to the social media outlet and to its cousin, Instagram.
Clegg, the former UK deputy prime minister who is now vice president for global affairs and communications at Facebook, said the company will reduce the presence of politics on people’s feeds after it lifted safety measures implemented for the 2020 US election. He claimed the move stems from user feedback seeking “more friends, less politics.”
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Facebook’s chief spokesman says the social media giant is going to institute new guards for younger Instagram users in the face of criticism from a whistleblower’s charges that the company puts profits ahead of users’ well being.
Later, in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Clegg said Instagram will also undergo some changes designed to better address youngsters amid claims that the service is damaging their mental health.
“But we understand the concerns of some that we need to press pause, listen to experts, explain our intentions and so on,” he said. “We’re going to introduce new controls for adults of teens on an optional basis, obviously, so adults can supervise what their teens are doing online.”
He added, “Secondly, we’ll be doing something which I think will make a considerable difference, which is where the teen is looking at the same content over and over again, and its content which may not be conducive so their well-being, we’ll nudge them to look at other content,” he said.
The appearances come after former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen testified this week that the company “intentionally hides vital information from the public” and “buys its profits with our safety.”
“One of the things we have heard from users both from the US and around the world since the election is people want to see more friends, less politics,” Clegg said on Meet the Press. “So we have been testing ways in which we can reduce the presence of politics for people’s Facebook experiences.”
He claimed on NBC that Facebook implemented safety measures during the “polarizing” 2020 elections. Some critics have said the so-called “safety” measures were largely deployed against conservative voices, and critics have also claimed Haugen’s testimony seemed to call for more such censorship in the name of “safety.”
“It’s simply not true to say we lifted those measures immediately – in fact, we kept the vast majority right through to the inauguration. And we kept some in place permanently – so we permanently don’t recommend civic and political groups to people,” Clegg said.
“But it’s worth remembering what those measures are like closing all the highways in a town because a temporary one-off problem in one neighborhood – you don’t do that on a permanent basis.”
Clegg said that some of the measures meant “perfectly innocent videos” were also stricken. Facebook’s measures, he said, were “very blunt tools which were scooping up a lot of entirely innocent, legitimate, playful, and enjoyable content – and we did that very exceptionally.”
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