> You'd have to remove groups, pages, public profiles, and sharing

Or they could just not show posts to groups you're not in and from pages and public profiles you don't follow! Allowing something to interject into your newsfeed should be opt-in, but right now it isn't even opt-out, except for not logging on at all. It would also be cool if there were a way to opt-out from seeing shared posts selectively for people on your friends list, e.g. I want to see things that Overly Political Relative posts themselves, but not things that they share from other places.

That being said, I deactivated my Facebook account a couple years ago, so I'm no longer a user whose opinion they should theoretically care about anymore.

I don't really use FB all that much these days, because the people I care to keep up with have largely moved on from it. But when i do log in, I get mostly the experience you want with the https://www.fbpurity.com/ chrome plugin I've spent the time to heavily customize.

My timeline shows as strictly chronological, and only text and photos posted by my immediate friends. No groups, ads, publisher's bullshit, promoted things, no trending, no nothing. Just photos and plain text.

Yep, back when I still used Facebook, I used that extension. I think that installing a third-party extension is probably a lot more than the average person knows to do, though. I was mostly making a point that if Facebook finds discussion over politics and the like too divisive for their internal company chat, maybe they should consider what they can do for the rest of us to keep things similarly sane.

I’m sure they could develop a classifier that would catch most (~90%) of political content, and make it opt-in - if people want to see it they can, but it could be hidden by default. This would be my preferred approach, so that I can use it for connecting with people but avoid listening to everyone’s political outrage.

You could def make this not suck by just making it so facebook automatically 'tagged' content and users can filter out certain tags. Since it'd be public, users could decide for themselves if the tags are reasonable for their filtering needs. But they'll never do it, because ad conversion rates and engagement would likely drop significantly.

> I’m sure they could develop a classifier that would catch most (~90%) of political content, and make it opt-in - if people want to see it they can, but it could be hidden by default. This would be my preferred approach, so that I can use it for connecting with people but avoid listening to everyone’s political outrage.

Eh, I don't really like that idea. For one, it only really addresses the problem of being exposed to content you find unenjoyable.

Honestly, sometimes I do wonder if consumer-level broadcast technology is the psychic equivalent of doing something like letting everyone fly planes without any training. It might be better to adopt communication technologies with a little more friction.

I spent the entire month of September 2016 flagging every single political post, whether it was a news article, friend's status, shared post, whatever, as "See less like this". It was completely ineffective. At the end of the month I was getting seeing just as much politics as before. So I'm not sure they can, or maybe want to. I was giving them all the input they needed to make a good classifier, and it was a lot of work. Maybe classifiers have improved enough in the previous four years.

You could build this as a browser extension... Call it "de-politics", and have it scan the HTML of popular sites (facebook, twitter, etc) and simply collapse/hide all content matching some filter.

I bet a simple keyword filter for names of politicians could catch 90%.

I wonder if people would pay for it?

If you take the time to set it up you can get close using https://www.fbpurity.com/ chrome plugin.

Ah, of course, censoring political discussion is the answer!

Censoring is when an authority removes content without your consent. Installing something that lets you decide what content to see (or not see) on a site is not censorship.

It is, however, sealing one's self in a chamber of like-minded opinion.

That implies Facebook posts are an accurate assessment of opinion, and not whatever the algorithms promoted to increase engagement.

I don't think you need to do that. I think just making the timeline a reverse-chronological firehose, and not filtering any posts out or making any posts more prominent, would do wonders. That's how Facebook used to present the feed.

Giving people tools to make sub-lists of certain friends/groups/etc. in order to organize their experience better (on their terms, not at FB's whim) would be great, too.