Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said today that there’s too much political content on the platform and he has some ideas about how to address that.

Zuckerberg brought the matter up when talking on the quarterly earnings call, saying that a top priority for 2021 was to lessen the amount of political fighting on Facebook. “This is a continuation of work we’ve been doing for a while to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversations,” he said with no hint of irony.

He talked about embracing more “healthy and positive” interactions between users. He added that although the company took down more than a million groups last year for violating the rules on hate speech and violence, he now wants to discourage users from joining groups that don’t break the rules but fan the flames of political divisiveness.

“For example, we stopped recommending civic and political groups in the U.S. ahead of the elections,” he said. “We’re continuing to fine-tune how this works, but now we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term, and expand this globally.”

Moreover, Zuckerberg said Facebook is currently thinking about reducing any kind of political content that might appear in the News Feed. How Facebook intends to do this he didn’t say, although he did state that he doesn’t want the platform to be free of all political discussions. He added that there’s importance in people seeing others’ perspectives, but from feedback, the company has learned “people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services.”

Like Twitter Inc. did yesterday, earlier this week Facebook said it would open up its platform to academic researchers so they could better understand how people use the platform. But in Facebook’s case, the transparency has more to do with how political ads were targeted on the run-up to the 2020 election.

Today the company announced a healthy fourth quarter, with profits and revenue better than expected. The number of daily active users on the platform was also higher than had been forecast.

Photo: J T/Flickr