If celebrities stop filming about politics and elections, the social media platform Instagram will cover their video production costs

The social media platform, Instagram is planning to cover the video production costs for some of the celebrities if they restrain themselves from talking about social issues, politics, and elections.

According to a document distributed by Instagram to agents and creators, anyone who gets money from the platform to produce content for IGTV, the app’s feature for uploading longer videos, should not include any content about social issues, elections or politics.

As per the sources familiar to the situation, this clause has alarmed many of the influencers and creators who have been approached about uploading videos on Instagram’s IGTV. 

This step has come in powerful contrast to Facebook’s defense for political speech online. Facebook is being criticized for a long time for letting politicians lie in advertisements on the social network. The CEO of the social media platform, Mark Zuckerberg has been arguing that free speech and political debate are too important to fact check political ads. Instagram’s IGTV contract is battling with this ethos by restricting political speech along with payment.

“In the last few years we’ve offset small production costs for video creators on our platforms and have put certain guidelines in place,”

a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

“We believe there’s a fundamental difference between allowing political and issue-based content on our platform and funding it ourselves,”

he further said.

People are criticizing social platform Facebook for spreading misinformation and struggling to battle against the election manipulation on its platforms ever since the foreign political parties used the company’s social network to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Governments across the world have forced Facebook to better look over the political news and ads, whereas the civil rights activists have said Zuckerberg should interfere to stop voter-suppression campaigns on its platform.