One of the biggest problems with social media is that our feeds are filled with things the algorithms think we want to see, rather than what we actually want to see.
If your Instagram recommendations seem increasingly out of touch with your interests, Meta is now offering you a chance to start over from scratch …
Instagram offers not one set of recommendations for each user, but three:
- Explore
- Reels
- Feed
The company says it now allows any user to reset each of them to start fresh.
We’ve started testing the ability for all Instagram users, including teens, to reset their recommendations. With just a few taps, you can clear out the recommended content in Explore, Reels, and Feed and start over.
Your recommendations will begin to personalize again over time, showing you new content based on the content and accounts you engage with. When you reset, you’ll also have the option to review the accounts you follow and unfollow any that share content you no longer want to see.
The feature is described as a test, but will be available to everyone worldwide, though it may take some time to roll out.
The company also highlighted other ways to manage your feeds.
For example, people can let us know they like the content recommended on their Explore page by clicking the three dots in the corner of a post and selecting “Interested.” We recently announced a new way for teens in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia to choose the topics they want to see more of, from books and travel to cooking and sports. We’re also offering ways for people to let us know what they don’t want to see in their recommendations by selecting “Not interested” from the three dots menu or using our Hidden Words feature to hide content with certain words or phrases in the caption.
We also offer a range of tools to help teens shape their Instagram experience beyond recommendations. For example, teens can switch to their Following feed to see content from the accounts they follow chronologically, starting with their most recent post. Additionally, they can favorite accounts to see content from those accounts more often and higher up in their feed, and they can see a special feed just of their favorites when they want to catch up quickly.
If this seems like too much of a focus on teens, it’s no coincidence. Meta has been under fire for intentionally making its apps addictive to teens and damaging their mental health through actions like creating unrealistic beauty standards for teenage girls.
Image: Meta
