Take Control of Your Instagram Feed: A Simple Guide to Resetting Your Recommendations

Instagram is currently one of the most used social media apps. Meta is continuously trying to make its user's experience better on the app. Now, they have started testing the ability for users 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.

Ways to Shape Your Instagram Experience:

This new feature, which will soon roll out globally, builds on the tools, Meta already offers to let people curate what they see in their recommendations.

For example, people can tell, they like the content recommended on their Explore page by tapping the three dots in the corner of the post and selecting “Interested.” Meta 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. It also offers people ways to tell them 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.

Different Tools to Help Teens:

Meta also offers 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.

Features like Close Friends give teens more control over who sees their Stories, while the “Your activity” section in settings lets teens see and manage all their previous interactions in one place, giving them more control over their digital footprint. We also encourage teens to regularly review their following lists, to make sure the accounts they're following are still accounts whose content they enjoy seeing.

Approach to Age-Appropriate Content:

Meta recognizes parents are concerned that their teens might see mature or inappropriate content online, which is why they have stricter rules around the kinds of content teens can see on apps. In addition to removing content completely when it breaks our rules, it takes steps to help prevent teens from seeing content that may be sensitive or mature. We avoid recommending it and in some cases. It hides it from teens altogether, even if it's shared by someone they follow.