Criticism grows as Meta allegedly hides Democrat hashtag

Donald Trump was officially inaugurated on Monday as the 47th president of the United States. Many people later tried searching for the hashtag “Democrat” and “DNC” on Instagram only to discover that the results had been hidden. The same cannot be said for the results of the hashtag “Republican” and “RNC”, which show up right away. This has been reported by several users across different countries, not just the U.S.

Of course, this has led to controversy over the content shown to us on social media, and how much of this might be deliberate.

Meta’s decision to hide “political content”

Meta, which controls both Facebook and Instagram, announced a decision to limit political content back in March of last year. Earlier in January of this year, however, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that it would discontinue its fact-checking program and move to an X-style “Community Notes” system to clarify user claims, with the goal of bringing more political content back to the apps.

When searching for #Democrat on Instagram, a message comes up warning of “Sensitive Content”:

Even after changing the Content Preferences to “more”, Instagram yields the same results for #Democrat. If you then change the Political Content to “more”, however, you will finally see results for the Democrat hashtag.

Meta has yet to speak on this issue, which is just adding to the idea that perhaps this is not just a bug, but rather a deliberate decision to filter content that users have access to. This has contributed to a concerning feeling that users have little control over what they see online.

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