On Instagram, politics is the new taboo

A content creator who goes by Mrs. Frazzled recently noticed something strange happening on her Instagram account.

The real-life Arielle Fodor is a former kindergarten teacher who has more than 370,000 followers on the platform. Her comical videos, channeling her former profession to gently chastise misbehaving adults, sometimes score millions of views.

Except, it seems, when she talks about the election.

Mrs. Frazzled sensed she was being shadowbanned by Instagram. That’s when the algorithm reduces the visibility of some posts. So Geoffrey Fowler, a tech columnist at The Washington Post, investigated.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Fowler about what he learned when he looked under the hood of Mrs. Frazzled’s Instagram account.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Geoffrey Fowler: So, I did some deep analysis. I went through every single one of her posts from the last six months, and I went into that detailed audience data, and I said, OK, how many people is she reaching? And then also I looked at stuff like was she reaching existing followers versus reaching outside people? And what I found was that whenever she posted something even vaguely about politics or social issues, the size of her audience dropped about 40% versus when she did content on nonpolitical issues. And then I said, OK, well let’s be a little bit more fine-grained here. What happens when she uses the word “vote” in her caption? When she did that, the audience dropped. I think it was something like 63% versus her nonpolitical stuff. So it’s a correlation, but it’s a pretty strong one, and we’ve seen these numbers in data from other organizations that have done research into this.

Meghan McCarty Carino: So, given that evidence, it seems pretty clear that it’s not just that the political posts are more serious so they’re not as engaging as her other content. That’s not what is driving how far her posts are spreading and being engaged with.

Fowler: That’s one of the excuses that social media companies always give whenever investigators or journalists go to do tests like this. They’re like, oh well, maybe this stuff just isn’t as good. In the case of Mrs. Frazzled, I tried to find some signals about that as well, and I found that when she posted about politics, people were much, much more likely to press the share button. Like, 50 times more likely, which is a strong indication that at least some people were really enjoying this content. So it wasn’t that she just was terrible at political stuff. But what this does is, you know, the creators don’t know what word they said or what thing they did that caused their content to get downplayed. And so they end up living in what I kind of sometimes describe as a state of algorithmic anxiety. They’re very nervous about it. They feel like, you know, what am I doing wrong? And they can’t figure it out. So, when I came to Mrs. Frazzled with my results, she was superhappy to know it wasn’t just her and she wasn’t just making it up.  

McCarty Carino: You homed in on the word “vote” in Instagram captions. Were there other elements that you could identify as potentially triggering the shadowbanning?

Fowler: Yeah, so vote is the new V-word, I guess. It was hard for me to identify exactly which other words have this impact. After I found at least one word, part of this process was that I went to Meta, and I said, “OK, here’s the evidence I found with this keyword. What other keywords are not allowed?” And to my great frustration, and the great frustration of so many creators out there, Meta just wouldn’t say. They wouldn’t even acknowledge that “vote” was a keyword you weren’t allowed to say. Instead, they just said, “Oh, there’s so many factors that go into deciding the ranking of a, of a particular post and how often it gets seen by an audience.”

McCarty Carino: That’s interesting because it does seem like Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, have been pretty open about kind of the desire to deprioritize politics. When Threads launched, this was kind of like a selling point and a differentiator from X, right?  

Fowler: Yeah. Let’s go back in time a little bit with Mark Zuckerberg. So, Facebook launched in the 2000s and during the Obama election and shortly following after it, a lot of folks involved in the early days of Facebook got very heavily involved in politics. Zuckerberg did this Facebook Live interview at Facebook headquarters with President Barack Obama. I was there in the room, and they spent nearly an hour talking about how social media and Facebook could contribute to politics and could contribute to democracy by giving citizens a way to have a direct conversation and give feedback. And then, of course, we now know famously that Facebook played this interesting role in the 2016 election and hosted Russian disinformation. And then Republicans started blaming Facebook for pushing Democrats and Democratic policies and ideas.

McCarty Carino: Yeah, I mean, the whole shadowbanning phenomenon was originally associated with the political right. They were saying that these social media platforms were deprioritizing conservative content, right?

Fowler: Yeah. We heard from a lot of politicians, at least on the right. You also heard from creators and people who were doing things about sexuality or Black Lives Matter who also felt like their voices were being downplayed. But all of this leads us up to 2021, and Mark Zuckerberg starts saying, you know what? I want to get out of politics. And he said Facebook was going to start downplaying politics. And then the hatchet really fell this year on Instagram. They said earlier this year that Instagram was no longer going to recommend content that is about politics or social issues, and you just kind of had to deal with it. That’s something that they announced in some articles, some Threads posts by Instagram people. But I don’t know if it’s really something that most Instagram users knew about. And I think we’re just now waking up — so close to the election — to the idea that, if it feels like people aren’t really talking about the election that much, if you’re getting your news from Instagram, which 1 in 5 Americans now do, there’s a reason for that. It’s because they’ve put their thumb on the scale to say that they don’t think that this is the place for people to be talking about it, even if that’s where people are talking about it or want to be talking about it.

McCarty Carino: Is there a harm in this? I can see how it could be a good thing if political discussions and the toxic discussions that often follow from that were a little bit less front and center on our social media platforms.

Fowler: For sure. I totally understand that some people do not want the partisan politics, the bickering or Russian disinformation in their social media feeds. But surely, we’re smart enough to know that there are other gradations of contributing to democracy that are not that. What Meta seems to have done in their policies is kind of get rid of all of them at the same time in one fell swoop.

In fact, some of what Mrs. Frazzled has been posting about and trying to get an audience for with her feed is just basic information about the electoral process. It’s about what ranked-choice voting is or what gerrymandering is, a kind of basic education. But all of that appears, based on my analysis, to get swept up together. So, I can understand that Americans don’t want rancor, but then people do still want to talk about their lives and the world around them.

And one of the things that I find so distressing, and I hear this from creators as well, about Meta’s approach to this, is that they really don’t tell you what is and isn’t allowed. So, they’ve said they don’t want politics and social issues, but like, what isn’t a social issue, right? And so again, I pressed them for a clear definition, but the definitions they gave were so vague that they could literally cover almost any aspect of the lived human experience. Also, if they’re using some kind of AI to determine what is and isn’t political or social, how does it deal with the fast-evolving world of conversation we’re having right now? Would bringing up Taylor Swift count as being too political, because she’s now made an endorsement? Would talking about coconuts flag the system, since that’s become a symbol for the Kamala Harris campaign? So, it really just starts to unravel when you realize how hard it is to really remove this from the lives of people who want to express themselves.

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We reached out to Meta for comment on this story. Here’s what a Meta spokesperson said:

“As we’ve said for years, people have told us they want to see less politics overall while still being able to engage with political content on our platforms if they want to — and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.”

In Geoffrey Fowler’s recent investigation for The Washington Post, he also has practical advice for those who’d like to see more political content in their Meta feeds.

Turns out there’s actually a content preference setting in Instagram, Facebook and Threads that defaults to limiting political content from people you don’t follow.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Frazzled has switched to writing the word “boat” instead of “vote” in her Instagram posts, in hopes of tricking the algorithm.