Meta’s Quiet Election

Four years ago, ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Meta was in a different place. Its name was Facebook. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was donating hundreds of millions of dollars to election integrity efforts. Its outsized role in the 2016 U.S. presidential loomed ahead of another moment in the spotlight. And within months, it would suspend the sitting president’s account.

Today, weeks before election day 2024, Meta is hardly factoring in the political conversation. It’s de-emphasized politics on its properties and ceded that game to TikTok and X. Facebook and Instagram are recommending far less political content, Whatsapp isn’t a political force in the U.S. (as it is outside), and Threads leadership repeatedly and explicitly told users they would not amplify political content. As such, there hasn’t been a single memorable political moment on a Meta service during the entire campaign season. 

Good. 

Social media feeds — driven by the outrageous, shocking, and bizarre — simply don’t mesh with the serious business of politics. The original dream that people would build empathy by engaging with political opponents on social media is dead. Realizing the mistake, Meta is out, becoming the first leading social media platform to disengage with politics. It’s a healthy move, and will only benefit society. 

Bringing politics onto Facebook was a product and a civic choice. From a product perspective, few content forms are more engaging than political conversations, which are typically relevant, controversial, and ripe for debate. Facebook’s foray into politics brought vibrancy into the platform, making social media impossible to ignore. And within the company, there was a belief that the engagement was a civic good, a tool that social movements like the Arab Spring used to overthrow authoritarian governments and air otherwise unheard arguments.

Social media does give voice to those who can’t find a fair hearing in mainstream conversations, and it does expand the political conversation in productive ways, but running politics through social networks can come with devastating side effects. Instead of thoughtful discourse, or something approximating it, political discussion on social media is driven by impulse and emotion, with flame wars rising to the top of feeds and the ‘share’ button becoming a voting mechanism for content that plays to emotion. 

While many celebrated the ‘Facebook Elections’ of past cycles for bringing the voting population closer to candidates, political actors eventually played to the platform’s incentives and optimized for divisive content. Professional outrage-baiters, meanwhile, built empires off angry referral traffic. And previously-sober news outlets became intoxicated with the feeds’ reach, adopting bad habits themselves. “All the wrong things went viral,” one editor recently told me. “It produced horrible incentives for news organizations, there was nothing good about it.” 

In this election cycle, Meta properties aren’t entirely devoid of politics. The since-recanted claim of immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio began in a Meta post, but was amplified and given life on X. That said, by shrinking the amount politics reccomended on its services, Meta will encourage less of these problematic posts. It may cost the company some relevance, but in the end, it’s worth it.

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157 billion

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