Not a week goes by without reports of crashes in Meta services. Okay, okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, because there are weeks that go by with one of their services without a problem occurring (or at least not coming to light). Of course, and if you thought about it, in this case I must clarify that the incident does not concern Facebook, no, on this occasion we are talking about two social networks linked since the creation of the other, Instagram and Threads.

Also in honor of truth, I have to say that I find this failure much more “forgivable” than others given the precedents we have encountered so many of them in the past in relation to Meta services. It’s not that it’s harmless of course, in fact it can have harmful consequences, but looking back I can’t help but wish that all the previous ones were comparable to the one we’re dealing with on this occasion .

A failure, as reported by The Verge, it is Instagram and Meta restrict political content to people who didn’t want it. To understand this, let’s recall that Meta introduced a configuration setting in both services a few months ago that allows users to indicate that they do not want to see (or that they want to minimize the amount of) policy-related content published by accounts they do not follow. A tool that, given that it is optional, seems like a great success to me.

This feature is disabled by default, so users who want to use it must enable it. However, as several users have already identified and Meta herself confirmed, political message filtering has been enabled by default in accounts that do not wish it, and in some cases even will turn on again immediately after the user manually turns it off. In my case, when I checked, I verified that the feature was active, even though I never activated it, and if I disable it and close the Instagram app, the blocking remains when I open it again. If you’re an Instagram user, you can check if this is happening in your case by following the steps you can see in the image above.

As I said, and as strange as it may sound, I personally find this failure less worrisome than many others we’ve encountered in Meta services. Less than a week ago we told you that Instagram was showing adult content to minors, shortly before the EU investigated (again) Facebook and Instagram… well, you know the story. Knowing about a bug that activates a feature designed to reduce noise by default doesn’t seem so bad. Other than that, of course In a few days, we enter the semester in which the presidential elections in the United States will be heldwith all communication campaigns associated with this process.