Instagram added a political content limit to your account. Here's what you need to know, including how to remove it.
Besides being Election Day in Wisconsin on Tuesday, it'll be election season in the state until the November election. Some voters might notice a less frequent trickle of political content on their Instagram feeds. That's because of a new political content limit that was automatically added to Instagram user accounts in March.
In February, Meta announced its decision to no longer prioritize and recommend political content to users. The posts that fall under this category include in-feed posts, reels, accounts and explore page recommendations related to things like laws, elections or social topics.
Many Instagram users were surprised when they realized Meta added the content limit to all accounts without notifying users how the change would be instituted.
"If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow," Meta wrote in a February statement.
The decision caused frustration among content creators and political leaders, who complained that the limits diminish their ability to connect with new users on the platform.
Among the most prominent complaints came from American film director Quentin Tarantino, who shared a post March 22, detailing that his follower base was consistently complaining about seeing his posts less frequently, specifically when he shared content related to politics and social issues.
"It's annoying to see content that people clearly want to see, with a high level of engagement, randomly be suppressed," he wrote. "Some days my stories have 20k views, and other days they have 200k."
Meta's decision came after several months of user complaints about the "shadowbanning" of political content on apps like Instagram and TikTok, specifically citing posts related to the war in Israel. An October 2023 story by Vox detailed that social media users who shared posts using words such as "Palestine" and "Gaza" were seeing drastic drops in viewership and engagement.
To avoid shadowbanning, some users relied on a method called "algospeak" to avoid the algorithm's ability to detect political content, writing "G@z@" or "P@lest!ne" to try to get around the content limitations.
Meta's decision to introduce a political content limit comes amid political pushes to ban TikTok, a platform that many young people say is their primary source of news. A 2023 study by Pew Research Center said the share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023.
With more social platforms potentially deprioritizing political content, elected officials, organizers and content creators might need to seek out new methods to reach their audience.
Here's what you need to know to remove political content limits from your account:
How to remove Instagram's political content limit from your account
Log onto Instagram and go to your profile page.
Go to your account settings, located at the top right of the profile page where you see three straight lines.
Search "Content Preferences"
Click "Political Content"
Select "Don't limit political content from people you don't follow"
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Instagram adds political content limit; what to know, how to remove it
