Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Funding shortfall for new tech endangers rural cell service, FCC says

Russian state media ramping up English, Spanish presence on TikTok, study finds

Microsoft is changing how you log in to your accounts

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Nationals can’t solve Nate Eovaldi, drop series finale to Rangers

How the Nationals helped Mitchell Parker develop into a big leaguer

The 6 best things to do with kids in the D.C. area this weekend 

Carolyn Hax: Husband keeps pushing modest spouse to wear sexier clothes

Ask Amy: Should I be the best man if I think the bride is abusive?

Miss Manners: Host eats luxurious breakfast, leaves cereal for guest

Hope Hicks witnessed nearly every Trump scandal. Now she must testify.

World Press Freedom Day, 2024

Biden holds events in battleground state of North Carolina

Riot police and over 2,000 arrests: A look at 2 weeks of campus protests

Look inside a D.C. mansion with an interesting ownership history

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Ukrainian men abroad voice anger over pressure to return home to fight 

Blinded in battle, these Ukrainian soldiers will never see their new babies 

Protesting Georgians are begging for real support from the West

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Local sports networks go dark mid-game amid dispute with Comcast 

Trump hush money trial live updates: Hope Hicks testifies about 2016 campaign, women

Big Tech news and how to take control of your data and devices

See more coverage in your recommendations

Technology

Tips delivered to your inbox twice weekly

The Tech Friend newsletter

Business and Tech alerts

Kimberly White

Days after <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> clinched a surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg touted his company’s influence in politics. The CEO proclaimed he was “proud” Facebook had given many “a voice in this election.”

“We helped millions of people connect with candidates so they could hear from them directly and be better informed,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook.

Now, on the eve of a matchup between Trump and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">President Biden</a>, Meta is changing course.

After years of pitching its suite of social media apps as the lifeblood of campaigns, Meta is breaking up with politics. The company has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/10/politics-meta-threads-instagram/" target=_blank>decreased the visibility</a> of politics-focused posts and accounts on Facebook and Instagram as well as imposed new rules on political advertisers, kneecapping the targeting system long used by politicians to reach potential voters.

Waves of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/22/meta-layoffs/" target=_blank>layoffs have eviscerated</a> the team responsible for coordinating with politicians and campaigns, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private personnel matters. This includes foreign-based workers and U.S. employees who promoted the company’s products to politicians and fielded questions from campaigns about their services.

An advertising sales team, which once embedded with the Trump team during the 2016 election campaign, is now responsible for many of their previous responsibilities, the people said.

Meta’s shift away from current events is forcing campaigns to upend their digital outreach in a move that could transform the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/election-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">2024 election</a>. Comparing March 2020 to March 2024, both the Biden and Trump campaigns saw 60 percent declines in their average engagement per Facebook post, a Washington Post review found, with double-digit declines on Instagram.

The Trump team has cast Meta’s moves as an effort to tip the scales in favor of Biden. The Biden campaign, meanwhile, had already begun to shift its online focus, rolling out a cadre of influencers and volunteers to spread their messages across private spaces on social networks.

Still, in tight races across the country, neither Democrats nor Republicans can afford to ignore Facebook — the world’s largest social media network. Political ad spending on social media is expected to almost double from $324 million in 2020 to $605 million in 2024, according to estimates from digital analytics firm eMarketer.

“There’s no other platform that reaches as many voters at that scale,” said Eric Wilson, a managing partner at Republican campaign tech incubator Startup Caucus. “So campaigns would be foolish to walk away from that.”

Meta spokeswoman Dani Lever argued that the changes are a response to user feedback. “These changes are intended to impact what people see because that is what they told us they wanted — to see less political content and have more controls,” she said. “This approach builds on years of work and is being applied to everyone.”

More than a decade ago, Silicon Valley courted the political world.

Zuckerberg <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/obama-brings-political-message-to-facebook-silicon-valley/2011/04/19/AFv40QBE_blog.html" target=_blank>moderated a 2011 town hall with President Barack Obama</a>, broadcast live on Facebook. Presidential debates in the 2016 campaign <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/20/technology/abc-news-debates-facebook-live/index.html" target=_blank>streamed </a>on Facebook Live. Advertising employees kept politicians and campaigns up to date on the company’s latest tools, even embedding with the Trump team in 2016.

But following widespread outrage over <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/18/how-russia-weaponized-social-media-got-caught-escaped-consequences/" target=_blank>attempts by Russian operatives to infiltrate social media</a> to influence the 2016 presidential race, Meta — then known as Facebook — began rejiggering its strategy. The company scrapped commissions for its political ads sales reps and created a new site to promote its tools for politicians across the political spectrum.

The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/january-6-capitol-riot/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Jan. 6</a>, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was partially organized on Facebook, sped this retreat. Soon after the siege, the company <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2021/02/reducing-political-content-in-news-feed/" target="_blank">announced</a> it would reduce the amount of political content appearing in users’ news feeds.

“People don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” Zuckerberg <a href="https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/FB-Q4-2020-Conference-Call-Transcript.pdf" target=_blank>told investors</a> three weeks after the attack.

In February, Meta announced that it would stop<a href="https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-our-approach-to-political-content-on-instagram-and-threads" target="_blank"> recommending political content</a> from accounts users don’t follow on Instagram or its upstart text-based app Threads. Instagram head Adam Mosseri warned last year that Threads would not “encourage” politics and “hard news” on the platform because it wasn’t worth the scrutiny.

The pullback has affected major news outlets, dramatically impacting engagement.

The 25 most-cited news organizations in the United States lost 75 percent of their total user engagement on Facebook and 58 percent of interactions on Instagram between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2024, according to a data analysis by The Post. Right-leaning news outlets such as Newsmax, the Daily Wire, Fox News and Breitbart suffered bigger declines than their mainstream counterparts on Instagram, but no such partisan split occurred on Facebook, the analysis found.

“It’s just an interesting moment,” said Natalie Stroud, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies social media. “There seems to be just a pattern away [from news and politics on social media], and it just makes me think: Where will people go for this information? Or will they just go without it?”

Research suggests that social media draws an “inadvertent audience” to news about current events, increasing users’ knowledge about politics. One 2020 <a href="https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.20190658" target=_blank>study </a>found that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections decreased users’ factual understanding of the news and political polarization.

“Most people don’t care about politics that much, and so they’re not going to go out and seek out information about politics,” said Joshua Tucker, a professor at New York University who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/27/social-media-research-meta-political-views/" target=_blank>studies social media and politics</a>. “Because people were on social media platforms for nonpolitical reasons, they got exposed to more political information.”

Meanwhile, political campaigns are adjusting to this new reality. Biden appears to be countering the trend by posting more frequently on social media accounts — including from official White House pages — to drive engagement. Biden-linked Facebook posts increased from about 300 in March 2020 to more than 600 in March 2024, while Trump’s posts dropped from more than 1,000 in March 2020 to about 200 in March 2024, the Post analysis found.

While Trump dramatically increased posts to his <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/14/truth-social-investors-faith-trump/" target=_blank>own social network, Truth Social</a>, he has refrained from publishing frequently on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. Top Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita likened Meta’s push away from politics to a form of shadow banning, when tech companies allow users to post but secretly depress who sees the content.

“People should be concerned, and Congress should have questions,” he said. “I think Big Tech would be absurd if they think Republicans would not have a concern about them putting their finger on the scale of organic political speech.”

By contrast, the Biden campaign headed into the 2024 race with the understanding that it would be difficult to reach voters online. Instead, the campaign has been relying on digital advertising and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/10/13/biden-organizing-campaign-election/" target="_blank">volunteers to spread the word</a> about the president in private digital spaces such as messages and social media groups.

Political campaigns of all types have sought to overcome Meta’s ad targeting limits by using their own data or publicly available information such as voter registrations to customize which ads are shown to certain audiences on Facebook. But trying to match voter files to individual users isn’t always precise and doesn’t completely replace the value that Meta’s targeting options once offered campaigns, said Wilson, the conservative digital strategist.

“Facebook knows a lot about its users,” Wilson said. “It’s some of the most valuable advertising data in the world … [but it’s not available] for political campaigns.”

Still, those campaign ads may become more critical in a world in which users are seeing less news and politics on their feeds.

“How are voters supposed to learn about the issues that are at stake in an election?” Wilson asked. “It’s, I think, ultimately troubling for both sides — but really our democracy in general — that politics is being treated as, like, a four-letter word and pushed out of the public square.”

Methodology: The Post analyzed Facebook and Instagram engagement for top news organizations as well as for the Trump and Biden campaigns using data from CrowdTangle. The Post examined the 25 media companies that received the most links from other media sources during the 2016 election, excluding non-news websites (Wikipedia and presidential campaigns), as included in the 2018 book “Network Propaganda,” by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts. The Post also separately examined regional publications and additional right-wing news outlets to ensure the robustness of the findings about partisan effects.

The analysis of campaign posts included accounts in the names of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/presidential-candidates-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">presidential candidates</a>, their running mates and the campaigns themselves. The Post also separately examined official White House pages from Trump in 2020 and Biden in 2024.

Princeton University, BA in sociology

Naomi Nix is a staff writer for The Washington Post, covering Meta and other social media companies. Before joining The Post in 2022, she was a reporter for Bloomberg News and the Chicago Tribune.

Naomi Nix

Lee Walczak Award for Political Analysis, National Press Club, 2013

New York Press Club Award for Political Coverage, 2014

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, MS in journalism

University of California at Santa Cruz, BA in literature

Michael Scherer is a national political reporter at The Washington Post. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for Time magazine, where he also served as the White House correspondent. Before joining Time, he was the Washington correspondent for Salon.com.

Michael Scherer

Claremont McKenna College, BA in linguistics and philosophy

Jeremy B. Merrill is a data reporter on the technology desk at The Washington Post, gathering and analyzing data to understand how technology, the internet and AI affect business, society and politics.

Jeremy Merrill

washpost

Why you won’t see Biden, Trump on Facebook or Instagram this election

the-washington-post

Accountable Tech Deploys “Keep Trump Off Facebook” Mobile Billboards Outside Meta Offices In Menlo Park, DC, and New York

Stringer

Getty Images

Help Desk

Artificial Intelligence

Internet Culture

Space

Tech Policy

Tech

prism://prism.query/two-sites,/technology,/politics/powerpost/the-technology-202?limit=20