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WSJ What’s News

The Consequences of Facebook’s Political Content Demotion

WSJ What’s News

The Wall Street Journal

News, Daily News

4.14.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2023

⏱️ 16 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

P.M. Edition for Jan. 6. After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Facebook said it would scale back how much political content users saw on its platform, but the changes went beyond incremental adjustments to its algorithm. WSJ tech reporter Jeff Horwitz joins host Daniella Cheslow to discuss how the social-media company reshaped political speech on its platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:11.1

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0:20.9

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0:26.9

Slack.com slash DHQ.

0:34.9

The US labor market stayed strong, with another 223,000 jobs added last month, but it may be

0:41.7

losing momentum. How's that going to affect the Federal Reserve's next policy meeting?

0:47.1

Also, Facebook said it would change its algorithm after the January 6 attack on the capital,

0:53.2

but internal documents show it took more drastic steps.

0:57.2

They were just going to demote anything that was on a civic topic. So that's politics,

1:02.9

local government, community, fundraising for charitable causes, environmental stuff, international

1:08.9

news. All of that stuff was just basically going to get demoted to the very bottom of the

1:14.7

pile.

1:15.7

And after four days of voting in Congress, there is still no speaker of the house. That's

1:21.9

bad news for Kevin McCarthy, but good news for C-SPAN. It's Friday, January 6. I'm Danielle

1:28.4

Cheslow for the Wall Street Journal, filling in for Anne Marie Fertoli. This is the PM edition

1:34.0

of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

1:49.0

chaos in Congress continued for a fourth day as Kevin McCarthy still could not unite

1:53.3

his Republican party around his bid to be speaker of the house. He did sway some detractors

1:58.3

with concessions, but it wasn't enough to win the 11th, 12th or 13th vote. After the

2:04.6

last one, the house voted to adjourn until 10 pm. McCarthy told reporters he was optimistic.

...

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