Are your Instagram recommendations a mess? You can now start from scratch

One of the biggest problems with social media is that our feeds are full of things the algorithms think we want to see, rather than what we actually want to see.

If your Instagram recommendations seem increasingly removed from your interests, Meta is now offering you the chance to start again from scratch …

Instagram has not just one set of recommendations for each user, but three:

• Explore
• Reels
• Feed

The company says it’s now letting anyone reset each of these, to make a fresh start.

We’ve started testing the ability for everyone on Instagram – including teens – to reset their recommendations. In just a few taps, you’ll be able to clear your recommended content across Explore, Reels and Feed and start fresh. 

Your recommendations will start to personalize again over time, showing new content based on the content and accounts you interact with. When resetting, you’ll also have the option to review the accounts you’re following and unfollow any that share content you no longer want to see.

The feature is described as a test, but will be made available to everyone globally, though the rollout may take a little time.

The company also highlighted other ways to control your feeds.

For example, people can tell us they like the content recommended in their Explore page by tapping the three dots in the corner of the post and selecting “Interested.” We recently announced a new way for teens in the US, UK, Canada and Australia to choose topics they want to see more of – everything from books and travel to cooking and sports. We also offer people ways to tell us what they don’t want to see in their recommendations by selecting “Not interested” from the three-dot 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 a Following Feed to see, in chronological order, content from accounts they follow, with the most recent post first. Alternatively, they can add accounts to a Favorites list so they see content from those accounts more often and higher in their Feed, and they can see a dedicated feed of just their favorites when they want to catch up on their posts quickly. 

If that seems like a lot of emphasis on teens, that’s no coincidence. Meta has been coming under continued fire for deliberately making its apps addictive to teens, and damaging their mental health through things like creating unrealistic beauty standards for teenage girls.

Image: Meta