Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app, a statement its CEO made sometime back. It has switched sides to be a short-form content app, like TikTok. Yesterday, Meta announced some major additions to the Instagram app that will help users control what they see in their feed.
Meta announced two new tools to shape your Instagram experience. These include a new “word filter” tool and the ability to mark multiple posts in Explore section of the app as Not Interested. Along with that, it shared multiple settings to exercise more control on your feed.
Instagram’s New Tools
The explore section often suggests many posts of a similar category. Now, you can use the selection feature to select multiple posts and mark them as not interested. These posts won’t appear in the Explore section. In addition, there is also an option to remove sensitive content from your feed. The option will appear in the expanded list of options in the filter button.
Instagram will also begin testing a word filter tool. The primary use of that will be to filter posts with a certain word in their caption or hashtags. It will be extremely helpful to filter content and exclude useless content or trend. You can even input phrases or emojis in the word filter tool. Apart from the above-mentioned tools, there are multiple settings that you can use to tailor your Instagram experience.
The first suggestion by Meta is to add certain accounts as your favorites and use the favorite feed instead of the main home feed filled with recommendations. Similarly, you switch to the Following feed to see posts only from the people you follow on Instagram. Whenever you see a suggested post, you can tap the cross icon to reveal more controls. From there, you can mark the post as not interested, and the algorithm will try not to show similar posts in the future.
You can also snooze posts for 30 days. Moreover, Instagram will add a setting to let you choose the level of sensitive content you want to see in your feed. You will get three options – More, Standard, and Less which you can use to customize your feed.
