Hundreds of Instagram creators today issued an open letter expressing their concern with Meta Platforms Inc.’s recent policy of limiting political content on the platform.

In February, Meta announced new policies regarding limiting political content, given this year will see a U.S. presidential election and a groundbreaking number of elections around the world. Meta, like other big tech firms, is being cautious about how social media could be used and abused to affect the outcome of such elections.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in February that politics on Meta’s X Corp. competitor, Threads, would only appear if enough people had interacted with it. This was a change from a previous announcement in which Meta said all political content on Threads and on Instagram would be limited by default. It remained limited on Instagram, which has become a cause for consternation among some of the platform’s biggest influencers.

“As users of Meta’s platforms, we did not choose to automatically opt-out of receiving suggested political content on civic activism and news updates,” the letter reads. “Removing political recommendations as a default setting, and consequently stopping people from seeing suggested political content poses a serious threat to political engagement, education, and activism.”

Meta has played fast and loose with the term “political content.” The company had earlier stated that this would include “topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large,” a far cry from content discussing elections. In enacting its policy, Meta seems to have dimmed the lights around content relating to LGBTQ rights, climate change, abortion, gun violence prevention, women’s rights and issues around race.

“Instagram is undermining the reach of our content online by limiting suggested political content on the platform through a new default setting for accounts,” the letter said. “With many of us providing authoritative and factual content on Instagram that helps people understand current events, civic engagement, and electoral participation, Instagram is thereby limiting our ability to reach people online to help foster more inclusive and participatory democracy and society during a critical inflection point for our country.”

The influencers said Meta has failed in terms of transparency by not letting people know what the algorithm was going to do. The complainants believe that Meta should “empower” users and give them the ability “to adjust their algorithm by making the setting to limit political content an opt-in user choice, rather than on-by-default.”

Meta hasn’t yet publicly responded to the letter. It’s very likely that the company has already thought long and hard about politics and its role in politics in what could be a tempestuous year for social media companies.

Photo: Luke van Zyl/Unsplash