Are social media moves to stifle politics a money grab?

An Instagram straitjacket on political recommendations is triggering concern over a ‘chilling effect on politics’ — and democracy — in New Zealand. Senior writer Derek Cheng looks at what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how it changes the game for politicians, not only in who they can reach, but how they reach them.

“All of it is political,” says Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick in an Instagram video she posted just over a week ago to her 160,000 followers.

“Even if you don’t engage in politics, politics engages with you and shapes the world around you, and it’s only really the beneficiaries of the status quo — those at the top of the pecking order — who benefit from you not engaging in these political conversations.”

She was responding to Meta, the global behemoth that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and FB Messenger, putting a stranglehold on recommendations in user feeds that contain political content.

The move, signalled in February, applies to Instagram and Threads, and will eventually extend to Facebook.

It doesn’t silence such content from people you follow. But it silences all recommendations likely to mention governments, elections, laws, or “social topics that affect a group of people and/or society at large”, according to the in-app settings.

They no longer appear in your Explore, Reels, In-Feed Recommendations or Suggested Users unless you go into your settings and opt in — which Swarbrick was imploring people to do.

There’s no sign that X, formerly Twitter, will follow suit, and it’s unlikely given X boss Elon Musk’s emphasis on it being a free speech platform. And the future direction of the fourth in the big four, TikTok, is harder to predict given the privacy and security concerns with the Chinese-owned app.

But politics will still be pushed further out of sight and mind, given the estimated 3 billion Facebook users and 2 billion Instagram users. This will in turn have potential ramifications for the quality of political discourse and, by extension, the health of democracies.

This was Swarbrick’s point in her post: vital issues, from climate change and housing, to inequality and the “genocide in Gaza” will no longer be as visible on a platform used daily by a massive audience.

“And there is no transparency on what’s considered political,” she told the Herald.

”It’s not as though there are billions of people trawling through billions of posts every day. There’s obviously an algorithm determining what’s political and what’s not.

“And there are a tonne of entities that are not necessarily easy to identify as political. Is it the case that a queer person is inherently political because we’ve identified in that way? Is it the case that somebody who lives in Gaza is inherently political, as opposed to somebody who lives in small-town America?”

Politicians and groups can still call attention to such issues using advertisements, which can be targeted to particular users — but that costs money, of course.

So is that the real play? To swell Meta’s coffers at the expense of all else?

‘Political chilling effect’

Meta hasn’t exactly gone to great lengths to explain the change. Spokeswoman Dani Lever said the move built on “years of work on how we approach and treat political content based on what people have told us they wanted”.

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, with a single line on Threads, added that it lets people “choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person’s appetite for it”.

But it’s a direction the company has been drifting towards, and could be a response to criticism of social media being potential echo chambers for misinformation or increasingly extreme content.

Mosseri’s comment in a Threads discussion last year alludes to this: “Politics and hard news are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise. But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.”

And Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, during an earnings call three years ago, said: “One of the top pieces of feedback we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services.”

Curtin University Professor of Internet Studies Tama Leaver said the impact on political discourse could be crippling.

“Content creators live or die by the platform’s recommendations, so the implication is clear: avoid politics,” Leaver wrote in his “terrible for democracy” article published by The Conversation.

“Meta couldn’t be clearer on this one: political posts will prevent audience growth, and thus make an already precarious living harder. That’s the definition of a political chilling effect.

“For the audiences who turn to creators because they are perceived to be relatable and authentic, the absence of political posts or positions will likely stifle political issues, discussion and thus, ultimately, democracy.”

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has more than 80,000 TikTok followers, with whom he shared his fashion choices on last year's campaign trail. Photo / TikTok

Less visibility of political content compounds the existing challenge of finding quality information on the likes of Instagram, says Massey University Professor of Marketing Analytics Bodo Lang.

“Instagram tends to flood users’ accounts with inconsequential and banal content that serves to briefly entertain the audience, while making users dopamine dependent, constantly on the search for the next quick fix,” he told the Herald.

“Politics is exceedingly complex. And that complexity won’t be served well by Instagram content that will likely be attention grabbing, but will fall short of being balanced, thoughtful, and genuinely informative.”

Such content is more likely to be found in traditional news outlets, something Facebook is also distancing itself from; it is closing its Facebook News feature on Australian and US platforms, saying “people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content”.

This is indicative of the wider trend: more and more people get their information from social media apps, where traditional news media are becoming less and less visible.

‘Money speaks a lot louder’

Leaver said Meta’s new policy has a more important impact for politicians: their reach will be curtailed.

“Politicians’ accounts in particular are likely hoping to reach swing voters more than anyone else, and that’s where these changes are likely to have a bigger impact.

“This is likely to significantly reduce any growth in reach these accounts might have had.”

People can still search for politicians’ accounts and follow them.

“But less-explicit, more-serendipitous following, where a specific post about an issue might have reached a new user/follower/potential voter, essentially won’t happen,” Leaver said.

“It does make growing an account’s followers significantly more work than it was before.”

How much more work? There’s no public data on how many people followed you after seeing an Insta-recommendation.

Any gap can be bridged, however, by using ads. This could lead to “an ‘arms race’ in an attempt to acquire more followers”, Lang said.

Swarbrick said there might be more charitable motives than commercial; Meta could be trying to dampen “content that outrages”, or self-regulate where global regulatory bodies have so far feared to tread.

“But you can also very much impute that, in the context of the US election and elections around the world, there is a captured audience on the likes of Meta platforms. We now have a situation where politicians and political parties, or those who are agitating for political change, are largely going to be forced to pay for ads,” she said.

“They can argue they’re doing it for all these glorious purposes, but ultimately, money speaks a lot louder.”

Act leader David Seymour echoed a similar sentiment.

“It could be viewed as a commercial decision, and they’ve decided that they’re happy to share political content so long as it’s paid for.”

Meta has been approached for comment on whether there was a commercial motivation for the change.

Online advertising “is actually a real boon”, Seymour said, given how New Zealand law restricts the amount of money political parties can put towards TV and radio ads.

Act spent about $400,000 on advertising with Meta in the campaign — more than any other party — including $17,800 on promoting Seymour’s Facebook page.

And though Swarbrick’s Insta-following is streets ahead of any other MP and more than thrice Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s, that doesn’t mean her posts reach all her followers; she still spent more than $10,000 on digital advertising in her successful campaign to retain Auckland Central.

That’s not something she had to do in the Auckland mayoral race in 2016.

“The algorithms weren’t in a place where organic reach was so restricted, especially for content that the algorithms were deeming could probably be paid for,” Swarbrick said.

“I think it would be far, far harder for somebody to replicate what I did in 2016 [without paying for a lot more ads], given how much the algorithms have changed to deprioritise agitators for change.”

‘Nothing beats face to face’

There’s a reason Te Pāti Māori is relatively absent on X compared with its presence on Instagram and TikTok; their voters are young. The median Māori male and female age are 25.8 and 27.9 years respectively, compared with national median ages of 37 and 39 years respectively.

The party spent only $50,000 on Meta advertising in the campaign, but focused a lot of energy on TikTok, which doesn’t allow paid political advertising.

It won six of the seven Māori electorate seats last year. Would that have happened without its social media game?

“It would’ve been hard to do without any social media, but I think the ground movement and the groundswell was just so huge,” says co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer.

“That was a large proportion of the campaign as well. Nothing beats face to face. Nothing.”

The new Meta policy was not a particular concern, she adds.

“We’re pretty flexible. Our own network and our own supporters will always find a way to communicate. That’s probably why we’re still such an activist party.

“Obviously, we’ll show people how to unblock [Meta’s change], but we’ll also adjust to what the next trend in the next forum is.”

TikTok was also a particular strategy for Luxon’s team; his TikTok videos had more than 17 million views in the campaign period — reaching about three-quarters of 18-to-34-year-old Kiwis on the platform — compared with 1.3 million for Labour.

National spent almost $320,000 with social media agency Topham Guerin during last year’s election campaign on advertising across Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and Google Search.

“Exit polling conducted by the National Party a week after the election shows that they beat the Labour Party 29 per cent to 27 per cent among 18-to-24-year-olds,” co-founder Sean Topham said in an article for realclearpolicy.com.

The silly and the serious

Topham thought Meta’s new policy would have a “negligible impact” because candidates and parties would still be able to buy ads.

“That’s really where the rubber hits the road on social media for politics. For years, the platforms have throttled back political content in their algorithms, so this is just another progression of that,” he told the Herald.

More spending on ads in response to the change would “definitely” be a factor, “but I don’t think it’s massive”.

“Candidates and parties need to work harder to create better content. If the content is good, people will see it, share it, engage with it. You can, and need, to do both [the silly and the serious],” Topham said.

That meant, for Luxon’s 81,000 followers on TikTok, goofy antics such as giving them a taste of his fashion choices at the start of his work day.

Swarbrick lamented the direction of travel for engaging content — dictated by the algorithms — which led to parties paying big bucks to strategists to “buy their way to relevance and being hip with the kids”.

It’s a lament Seymour shares.

“Some of my most popular posts are just me standing in Mt Eden having a coffee, which is a shame,” he said.

“It may be that the public are hungry for this kind of content. But I suspect that the algorithms are promoting less policy-driven content.”

He said Act would also probably have to spend more on ads.

“But that’s just part of adapting to the ever-changing landscape. If you look at the last couple of hundred years, the printing press revolutionised politics. In the 1930s, it was FDR with his fireside chats on the radio,” Seymour said.

“Television really created Kennedy. And I would argue social media brought about the likes of Barack Obama, and more recently Jacinda Ardern; I think I’ve called her many times our first Instagram Prime Minister.

“There’ll always be new technology for communication between politicians and voters. And we’ll just adapt to that.”

Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.