Technology

The potential issues:

• this was enabled for everyone by default instead of being opt-in
• It's hard to tell what will be blocked by this. "Activism" is political. Calling out tech oligopolies is "political", and by extension advertising the fediverse could be "political". This could be an easy way to hide content that harms Meta or its partners.
• It encourages users and content creators to avoid controversial topics. It's hard to fix issues in our communities if we don't talk about them

The fact that Meta is doing this makes me suspicious. Here in Canada, they booted off news organizations and now instead of reputable organizations sharing what's happening, that niche is filled by other... content.

I personally try to avoid any suggested content and only use my subscriptions. For those who want to change it back:

change the setting, users can navigate to Instagram's menu for "settings and activity" in their profiles, where they can update their "content preferences." On this menu, "political content" is the last item under a list of "suggested content" controls that allow users to set preferences for what content is recommended in their feeds.

There is one good side. While we can't see the algorithms used to classify content as "political", creators can check their own status and publicize issues:

Meta's blog noted that "professional accounts on Instagram will be able to use Account Status to check their eligibility to be recommended based on whether they recently posted political content. From Account Status, they can edit or remove recent posts, request a review if they disagree with our decision, or stop posting this type of content for a period of time, in order to be eligible to be recommended again."