What if you could turn off political content entirely on each social platform? Would that enhance your personal experience?

For most, it would, and though not all platforms are interested in making that available as an optionâ€" possibly because it's one of their biggest drivers of engagement–LinkedIn is, with a new test underway to give users a way to simply switch off all the posts and updates about politics.
As explained to The Wall Street Journal by LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky as to how the feature works, now available in beta for a small portion of US users, the keywords and signals from users combined with the input from the editorial team at LinkedIn identify political posts for removal from feeds. Users will be able to block posts on certain topics from appearing in their stream as well in the near future.

Interesting experiment, which could help LinkedIn boost engagement among its 800 million members. For the most part, political posts don't really fit on LinkedIn, but then again, many people work in political and advocacy roles, which could theoretically get caught up in this cull option that might impact platform reach and performance for some users and brands.

That is a big note, and something for related businesses to watch out for because if enough people do indeed choose to switch off political posts, the impact could be considerable, which is also relative to how LinkedIn identifies political content and possible mistakes in its automated detection.

Errors might well be expected, but the exercise still might have value: it could open the door for other social apps to make similar moves and forge their own controls over political exposure on their platforms.

Though as noted, it's probably a lot harder to enact on say, Facebook or Twitter, where politics are so baked into app engagement. On the one hand, they probably don't want to circumscribe those conversations too much, and decrease usage, while the amount of false positives would likely pose more of a risk to user satisfaction on those apps than it might on LinkedIn.

However, on the other hand, Meta-parent company of Facebook-announced last year that one of the most common notes of feedback it hears frequently from users is a desire not to have politics and fighting take over the in-app experience. That led Facebook to roll out another experiment that de-emphasizes political posts in user feeds, which is still current, and given this, it is possible that Facebook too may well look to implement similar in the future, especially as it tries to win back younger users.
Again, again the impact here, you'd think would be much greater than on LinkedIn but it will be interesting to see whether LinkedIn users warm to the option, and what extended effects that has on users, both individual and business.

LinkedIn has piloted the new feature with a small subset of users - if you are one of them, you can find the feature to block political posts from appearing in your feed in 'Account preferences', 'Feed preferences'.