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

If your Instagram the recommendations seem more and more distant from your interests, Meta now offers you the possibility of starting from scratch…

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

The company says it now allows anyone to reset each of them, to get a fresh start.

We’ve started testing the ability for all Instagram users, including teens, to reset their recommendations. With just a few clicks, you can clear recommended content in Explore, Reels, and Feed and start fresh.

Your recommendations will begin to personalize again over time, showing new content based on the content and accounts you interact with. When resetting, you will also have the option to review the accounts you follow and unfollow those who share content you no longer want to see.

The feature is described as a test, but will be made available to everyone globally, although it may take a little time to roll out.

The company also highlighted other ways to control your feeds.

For example, people can tell us they like recommended content on 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 the topics they want to see more of – from books and travel to cooking and sports. We also provide ways for users 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 containing certain words or phrases in the legend.

We also offer a range of tools to help teens shape their Instagram experience beyond recommendations. For example, teens can switch to the Follows feed to view content from the accounts they follow in chronological order, starting with the most recent post. Alternatively, they can add accounts to a favorites list in order to see content from those accounts more often and higher up in their feed, and they can see a feed dedicated just to their favorites when they want to quickly update their posts .

If this seems to focus on teenagers, that’s no coincidence. Meta faces constant criticism for deliberately making its apps addictive among teenagers and harming their mental health, for example by creating unrealistic beauty standards for teenage girls.

Image: Meta