Love them or hate them, more than half of the world’s population interacts with algorithmic recommendations in some way every day. Algorithmic recommendations play an integral role in how users discover new content across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. It can be nice to be fed a stream of fresh posts, pictures, and videos that are already tailored to our interests instead of manually hunting for content to engage with, but algorithms don’t always show you what you actually want to see.
Many online platforms provide features that aim to help you fix this. The algorithms they deploy are, after all, designed to make you spend more time consuming content and work in similar ways. Recommendations may be based on demographic data like age, sex, and location, your online activity, what you and similar users are interacting with, and more. Most algorithm tuning features follow the same basic premise: you tell the platform what you want to see more of, or less of.
For example, Meta’s in-development “Dear algo” feature for Threads takes that premise quite literally, allowing users to ask for “more” of specific type of content. Meanwhile, the recently launched “Your Algorithm” tool for Instagram lets users see and manage which topics are driving their Reels recommendations. Some content on online platforms may be artificially promoted regardless of whether it aligns with user interests, however. This article breaks down what algorithm tuning tools are provided by some of the most popular online platforms, and other solutions that can help you to — at least partially — reign in recommended content.
Facebook:
The “Interested” and “Not interested” options will also be identified with Plus and Minus icons respectively. Image by The Verge | Jess Weatherbed
The posts that appear on your Facebook feed are a mix of recommended content and whatever is being published by friends and pages you follow. For the latter, you can just leave any page groups you’re no longer interested in and unfriend users to stop seeing their posts.
An easy way to do this is to go to Settings & privacy > Content preferences, and then open the “Unfollow people and groups” option to quickly manage your friends and group lists in one place. The Content preferences menu also lets you toggle off suggestions for political content and provides a “Show less” option for sensitive or graphic content.
There are other controls available under Settings & privacy > Settings > Your activity > Activity log that list other interactions you’ve had on the platform: comments, search history, videos watched, and more. Deleting these interaction histories (either individually or by clearing them entirely) may help to prevent Facebook’s algorithm from suggesting similar content in the future.
For specific posts, you can click into the three-dot menu at the top right of the post itself and select either “Interested” to see more of similar content, or “Not interested” to prompt Facebook into showing you less related content. Meta said it’s planning to “introduce new ways for you to shape your Feed” on Facebook in the coming months, including the ability to give feedback on why something in your feed may not be relevant to you.
Instagram:
... continue reading