In January 2021, after pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new priority for Meta: He wanted to reduce the amount of political content on the company’s apps, including Facebook and Instagram.
As the United States hurtles toward November’s election, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan appears to be working.
On Facebook, Instagram and Threads, political content is less heavily featured. App settings have been automatically set to de-emphasize the posts that users see about campaigns and candidates. And political misinformation is harder to find on the platforms after Meta removed transparency tools that journalists and researchers used to monitor the sites.
Inside Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, no longer meets weekly with the heads of election security as he once did, according to four employees. He has reduced the number of full-time employees working on the issue and disbanded the election integrity team, these employees said, though the company says the election integrity workers were integrated into other teams. He has also decided not to have a “war room,” which Meta previously used to prepare for elections.
Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee laying out how he wanted to distance himself and his company from politics. The goal, he said, was to be “neutral” and to not “even appear to be playing a role.”
“It’s quite the pendulum swing because a decade ago, everyone at Facebook was desperate to be the face of elections,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of Anchor Change, a tech consulting firm, who previously worked at Facebook.
The result is that the near-constant barrage of headlines that Meta faced in past U.S. elections about its role in political discourse has largely abated. The company is instead recommending more content about sports, cooking, animals and celebrity gossip to its users.
Online political conversations this election cycle instead appear to be taking place more prominently on other platforms, such as TikTok and Elon Musk’s X. The campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump have turned to niche TikTok creators to humanize the candidates and reach young voters. Mr. Musk posts almost daily on X about Mr. Trump, whom he has endorsed for president. Even Zoom, the videoconferencing app, has become a major gathering ground for grass-roots political organizing.
Yet political posts, images and videos have not disappeared from Meta’s apps — they are just less visible. Anyone searching Facebook or Instagram for political groups or posts can quickly find them. Misinformation and conspiracy theories still spread on private groups on Facebook and WhatsApp, and the company continues to regularly remove disinformation campaigns from Iran, China, Russia and other countries. During a debate with Ms. Harris in September, Mr. Trump spread false stories that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets — a claim that started with a now debunked post on Facebook. The posts have been shared millions of times….