Facebook Says it Will Stop Recommending These Groups Permanently

Social networking site Facebook announced this week that the company will stop recommending political groups permanently.

The company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that Facebook will no longer recommend civic and political groups to its users.

Zuckerberg also said that the company is now considering steps to reduce the amount of political content that users see in their News Feed.

“This is a continuation of work we’ve been doing for a while to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversations,” Zuckerberg said in a call with analysts.

The announcement came following the company’s fourth-quarter earnings.

It was this past October that Facebook had temporarily stopped recommending these groups to U.S. users ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

“One of the top pieces of feedback that 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,” Zuckerberg said.

In regards to the company’s fourth quarter and full year financial results, Zuckerberg said, “We had a strong end to the year as people and businesses continued to use our services during these challenging times. I’m excited about our product roadmap for 2021 as we build new and meaningful ways to create economic opportunity, build community and help people just have fun.”

The company’s CFO David Wehner remarked, “We continue to face significant uncertainty as we manage through a number of cross currents in 2021. We believe our business has benefited from two broad economic trends playing out during the pandemic. The first is the ongoing shift towards online commerce. The second is the shift in consumer demand towards products and away from services. We believe these shifts provided a tailwind to our advertising business in the second half of 2020 given our strength in product verticals sold via online commerce and our lower exposure to service verticals like travel. Looking forward, a moderation or reversal in one or both of these trends could serve as a headwind to our advertising revenue growth.”

At the same time, in the first half of 2021, we will be lapping a period of growth that was negatively impacted by reduced advertising demand during the early stages of the pandemic. As a result, we expect year-over-year growth rates in total revenue to remain stable or modestly accelerate sequentially in the first and second quarters of 2021. In the second half of the year, we will lap periods of increasingly strong growth, which will significantly pressure year-over-year growth rates.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.