TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A Taiwan law professor and social media expert said Meta should be more transparent after the company rolled out an update automatically limiting political content on Instagram and Threads.
In February, social media giant Meta quietly announced that it will no longer “proactively recommend political content” from accounts that users do not follow on Instagram and Threads. The change received more coverage in late March when a Meta spokesperson said the company had begun rolling out the change more widely.
Instagram has a reported 11.35 million users in Taiwan, and more than half of Taiwan’s population over the age of 13 use the app. Users can reverse the app-wide change in their settings but were not given the option to opt out before it was implemented.
“Political content” is defined by Meta as posts “potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics.” Chiang Ya-chi (江雅綺), a law professor at the National Taiwan Ocean University, said this definition is “very broad.”
“If you look at this in a negative sense, it would seem to be very similar to the content moderation or censorship in China,” said Chiang, who is also president of the Taiwan Law and Technology Association.
Chiang told Taiwan News she is not suggesting the two are the same, but said the definition is so broad that it could be viewed this way at the extreme end.
She said that by restricting political content, Meta may be seeking to avoid accusations that foreign states or bad actors are using their platforms to influence some of the many elections this year.

Chiang said the disadvantage may be that young people, many of whom rely on Instagram for news, will not have access to the information they need. The issue is further complicated by Meta’s unclear definition of political content, she said.
She noted the example of Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and his popularity among younger voters during Taiwan’s recent election. Ko’s popularity among younger voters was in part attributed to his strong social media presence, as the 64-year-old former Taipei mayor has 1.2 million followers on Instagram and over 2.3 million likes on TikTok.
“If you follow Ko’s account on TikTok, you will see his popular posts don't always look very political on the surface,” Chiang said. “So the key will be, how is political content determined? Is anything posted by a politician going to be considered political content?”
Chiang said Meta should release a transparency report on content moderation as a “basic requirement.” “Meta plays such a crucial role in shaping our information environment. I think it is important for them to inform the users about what they do," she said.
Putting the impact of Meta’s changes aside, Chiang said that using social media as a source of news is “definitely not” a good idea. She said social media is a platform that encourages disinformation and misinformation by nature.
Despite that, a 2023 Reuters Institute study found that 31% of people in Taiwan share news via social media. Instagram is the fourth most popular social media platform for sharing news, behind Facebook, YouTube, and Line.

Taiwan News spoke to university students who offered mixed opinions about the change, while mostly agreeing that it would be positive if they saw less political bias in their feeds. Chiu Chu-chun (邱楚鈞), a fourth-year management student at Taipei’s Soochow University, said it was the first time he heard of the change, and immediately said it was a good one.
Chiu said recently he noticed his feed is full of bias, and that it is hard to find neutral and objective views. He said the news he was viewing on Instagram was mainly from influencers rather than traditional news outlets.
Chiu said he was not previously aware of Instagram's new content recommendation strategy, but over the past weeks, he noticed less political content in his feed. “At the moment, I can’t see anything bad about the change,” he said.
Lin Chia-hung (林嘉鴻), a second-year finance student at Soochow University, said he thought too much political content would be a bad thing. “I think the important (political content) is still needed, but if there’s too much you are just going to scroll past it," he said.
Graduate student of political science at National Sun Yat-sen University Wang Hsuan-hsiang (王瑄襄) said she often looks to Instagram and Threads for international political news. She said she was not previously aware of the change.
Wang said she had noticed less political content on her Instagram and Threads feeds in recent weeks, though attributed it to the fact Taiwan’s presidential election had passed. Wang said she can understand why some users would be happy to see less political content on their feeds.
“Take my younger sister for example, she isn’t a political science student, so when she uses social media it's for relaxation and entertainment. When she gets off work she doesn’t want to see a lot of political content,” she said.
Wang also said that those who want to see political content like herself can still find it by searching it out themselves.
Professor Chiang said she understood the desire to avoid political content when using certain apps, and said it seemed some young people were not bothered by Meta’s change.
Chiang said this was not necessarily a cause for concern. “In a way, we should trust that these digital natives have their own judgment in this system,” she said.
Despite that, Chiang reiterated her view that the lack of transparency in Meta’s announcement was problematic. “The problem is people don’t know what kind of content the platform will be delivering to the users," she said.
Political content could still be embedded in entertainment content without the user's knowledge after the change, she said. Chiang said for this reason, it is important that regulators continue to push social media operators to provide more information about the sources and funding of different types of content.