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.
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.
For Reels specifically, Meta has a tool that allows you to manage which topics Instagram is using to feed recommended videos to your Reels tab. On the Instagram mobile app, you can tap the icon that resembles two hearts on line sliders at the top-right corner of Reels videos to see an AI-generated summary of topics that are based on your activity history, such as gaming, haircare, college football, or whatever else you’ve interacted with.
Tapping on any of these interests gives you the options to watch Reels on that topic, delete it from your interests, or specify to see less of it on your feed. You can also manually add new interests that you want to see more or less of that aren’t included in the AI summary. The Instagram app will also let you tap the three-dot menu on individual Reels to select “Interested” or “Not Interested,” but this feature isn’t available on the desktop Reels tab.
The main Instagram feed presents those Interested / Not Interested options on both mobile and desktop devices. And like Facebook, Instagram users can click into Settings to manage preferences for sensitive and political content and curate their activity history across likes, comments, reposts, tags, and more to remove anything that might be flagging certain interests to Instagram’s algorithm.
Threads allows you to tap on the three-dot menu on any post on the web and mobile app, and select “Not interested” to see less content around that topic. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, however, Threads won’t let you specify posts you want to see more of. There are also fewer options to manage recommended content if you head into the account settings on desktop devices — you can restrict profiles to see fewer posts from them, block profiles entirely, and mute specific words or phrases to prevent posts that contain them from appearing in your feeds.
The Threads mobile app will provide additional options under the settings menu at the top right of your user profile. From there, you can remove any likes you’ve left on posts, or select “Content preferences” to toggle suggestions for political and sensitive content, alongside muting accounts and filtering words.
Threads is also testing a feature called “Dear algo requests” that can be accessed under this menu, or by typing “Dear algo” in a post, and then describing what you want to see more or less often in your feeds for up to three days. I’m seeing this feature available on my own account in the UK, but the beta may not be available to every user yet.
There are two ways to tune your algorithm on X, and they can both be accessed the same way across web and mobile apps. The first is to tap the three-dot menu at the top right of a post on your “For You” feed, and select “Not interested in this post” to see less of any similar content. Note that this option won’t appear if you open the post itself, so make sure you’re accessing the menu from the feed timeline.
The second and more comprehensive option is to open Settings and privacy > Privacy and safety > Content you see. This view will let you toggle to display media containing sensitive content and see a full list of interests that X is using to “personalize your experience” across the platform. These will all feature a ticked checkbox, so just go through and untick anything you’re not actually interested in seeing, though X says that changes “may take a little while to go into effect.”
The “Content you see” menu also lets you mute accounts and keywords to keep them out of your feeds and manage topics you want to follow or see less of. Following topics will prompt X to show you more related content, while the topics on posts you’ve already flagged to see less of will appear under the “Not interested” tab.
TikTok provides similar algorithm tuning tools to X, including the ability to flag specific videos you’re not interested in. You can access this on the TikTok mobile app by long-pressing on the video or by opening the three-dot menu at the top right of videos on the desktop web platform. Web users can also open the settings menu to filter specific keywords, preventing posts that contain them in titles, descriptions, or stickers from appearing in your feeds.
Additional features can only be accessed on the TikTok mobile apps. On your user profile, open the three-line menu at the top right and select Settings and privacy > Content preferences. You can open the Manage topics option to see a list of preset interests like Dance, Humor, Sports, Food & Drink, and more, each with a slider to adjust if you want to see more or less of that topic on your feed. Content preferences also allow you to enable a “Restricted Mode” that limits content that “may not be comfortable for all audiences.”
For more drastic changes, TikTok has a feature that helps to retrain its algorithm to what video topics you enjoy watching. Selecting “Refresh your For You feed” under Content preferences will “temporarily show you popular videos you may not normally see,” according to TikTok, allowing it to learn what you like from scratch based on videos you like, share, and interact with.
YouTube’s algorithm tuning tools may require some patience because the platform doesn’t provide an overview of topics or interests you’re being targeted with. On the YouTube homepage, you can open the three-dot menu at the bottom right under each video on the web or mobile app and then select “Not interested” to see less of similar content, or “Don’t recommend channel” to keep the creator who posted it out of your feeds.
The same feature works slightly differently for Shorts — the “Not interested” and “Don’t recommend channel” options are both available on the YouTube mobile app’s Shorts tab and can be accessed by either long-pressing on a video or opening the three-dot menu at the top right. The Shorts tab on YouTube’s web platform only provides you with the option to block channel recommendations, however, and only allows you to tag Shorts you’re not interested in if those Shorts appear on YouTube’s homepage.
If you want to hide recommended videos entirely, you can delete and turn off your YouTube watch history on your connected Google account by going to My Activity > YouTube History.
There are a few ways to adjust what content will appear on your Reddit home feed. As we’ve seen with other platforms, you can open the three-dot menu at the top right of suggested posts and select “Show fewer posts like this.” You can also click on your user profile and open Settings > Preferences on the web, or Settings > Account settings on the Reddit mobile app to mute specific subreddit communities, filter out mature content, or toggle home feed recommendations off entirely.
If you keep it active, then Reddit will recommend posts based on your activity on the platform, including your search history and posts or communities you’ve interacted with.
It’s easy to direct what content you want to see in the preset Discover feed on Bluesky. Just open the three-dot menu at the bottom right on any post and — you guessed it — select if you want to see more or less of similar content. Alternatively, you can unpin the Discover feed entirely and replace it with a more curated feed that focuses on topics you’re interested in by selecting one of the options under the My feeds tab, identified by its hashtag symbol.
Like other platforms, the algorithm on Tumblr’s “For you” tab is largely prompted by how you interact with the platform itself and what’s popular with similar users in your communities. If you like art and follow a lot of artists, Tumblr will recommend art-related posts, and so forth.
For posts that aren’t from users or communities you follow, you can open the three-dot menu to tag that you’re not interested in the post itself, or the community it was shared in. You can also open Settings > Dashboard preferences to turn off suggestions that are “based on your likes” and posts from your communities in the following tab.
