Geoffrey Fowler column for WaPo:

On Instagram, creator Mrs. Frazzled can get more than a million viewers for her goofy videos “parenting” misbehaving adults. One recent hit showed bartenders how to talk to drunk customers like they’re in kindergarten. But lately, she’s been frazzled by something else: Whenever she posts about the election, she feels as if her audience disappears.

It’s not just her imagination. I can show exactly how democracy dies on Instagram.

Mrs. Frazzled, whose real name is Arielle Fodor, let me inside her Instagram account to investigate. I found that whenever she mentioned anything related to politics over the last six months, the size of her audience declined about 40 percent compared with her nonpolitical posts.

It appears she can’t even say “vote.” When she used the word in a caption across 11 posts, her average audience was 63 percent smaller. “It is very disempowering,” Fodor says.

If you’ve suspected that you’re yelling into a void about the election on Instagram, Facebook or Threads, it might not be your imagination, either. Downplaying politics is a business and political strategy from Meta, the social media giant. And users just have to accept it.

Consider a wider study by the advocacy group Accountable Tech, which quantified the audience drop for five prominent liberal Instagram accounts, including the Human Rights Campaign and Feminist, that post almost entirely about politics. Over 10 weeks this spring, their average audiences fell 65 percent.

And it’s not just Instagram: Only one of six social media giants would tell The Washington Post whether you can use the word “vote” without having a post suppressed.