Instagram users searching for the terms “Democrat” or “Democrats” have been getting an error message.
In a story that has raised eyebrows in light of the newly sparked bromance between Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, Meta is claiming that the “results hidden” message popping up is a technical problem.
Instagram, which will soon see sweeping changes to its moderation, claims that the problem is also affecting some Republican hashtags and promises there is no political maneuvering at play.
What Are Users Seeing?
BBC News reports that the error comes up when users directly search for “Democrats” or “Democrat.” These searches result in an error screen that says: “We’ve hidden these results. Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content.”
However, there are also limited results being reported when users search for “Republicans” but not “Republican.” But a search using the hashtag “Republican” returns 3.3 million posts while, at one point, users were reporting that the hashtags “#Democrat” or “#Democrats” returned no results at all.
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Issued Resolved but Questions Remain
Meta was quick to bat away accusations of partisanship and told the BBC in a statement:
“We’re aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it.” – Meta spokesperson
It could be an innocent technical error but comes at a time when Meta is fundamentally changing its approach to politicized speech across all of its platforms. This also includes changing its Community Guidelines, and the flagging of certain search terms.
Entrepreneurs and Government
This technical issue also comes at a time when Mark Zuckerberg has gone from banning Donald Trump from his platforms to visiting him at Mar-O-Lago, donating $1 million to his inauguration fund and being at the president’s inauguration ceremony.
He was there alongside Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Google boss Sundar Pichai.
There has been a fundamental shift in Zuckerberg’s attitude to the now president and this technical glitch has hit the headlines because of this.
