Soon after giving Instagram users the option to nuke their account’s content preferences, the Meta-owned social media giant is now rolling out a less destructive alternative.
You’d typically want to wipe your account’s content suggestion algorithm if it gets too out of hand, essentially giving your Explore page a fresh start. However, Instagram’s new ‘Your Algorithm’ tool wants to give users more precise controls to fine-tune suggestions as a replacement for nuking them, as highlighted in a new blog post.
As your interests evolve over time, we want to give you more meaningful ways to control what you see on Instagram, starting with Reels. Using AI, you can now more easily view and personalize the topics that shape your Reels, making recommendations feel even more tailored to you.
The new tool is first rolling out for the Reels tab, and users will see an icon for it in the upper right corner when watching short-form videos on the platform. The icon looks like a filter icon with a slight twists — on Instagram, it will appear as two lines with hearts.
Tapping the new icon opens your ‘algorithm,’ which highlights what type of content you’ve been into lately, content chips for the type of videos you want to see more, and similarly, chips for content that you want to see less.
Limited to the US for now
As seen in the image above, the ‘what you want to see more of’ section will already be populated when you open it for the first time. “Based on your activity, summarized by AI” says text under the section. Users then have the option to fine-tune the suggestions even further, essentially by removing some topics, and adding other ones.
Once fine-tuned, you then have the option to “share your interests to your Story, so friends and followers can see what you’re into.”
The new tool is rolling out starting today in the US. It will expand globally to all users using Instagram in English “soon.” Similarly, while currently limited to Reels, Instagram does plan to expand it to the Explore page and “more places in the app soon.”
