After years of relying heavily on algorithmic recommendations to populate users’ feeds, social media platforms are rolling out tools to give users more control over the content they see.
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New York —
As a new mom-to-be, my social media feeds have clocked me — funneling endless videos my way about pregnancy, nursery prep and birth stories, to the point of baby information overload. I needed a break.
I recently told my Instagram algorithm I’m no longer interested in seeing content about “pregnancy” or “birth,” although at least for now I’ve kept its suggestion to show me “newborn parenting hacks.”
Instagram this year expanded its feature that lets users provide this kind of specific feedback to tailor their feed. And across the social media ecosystem, platforms are increasingly offering similar options to give users greater control over what they see as they scroll.
It’s something users have been asking for after social platforms spent years leaning into relying on their own algorithmic recommendations to populate feeds.
In addition to Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and smaller social media upstarts like Divine have all recently rolled out features to let users tailor their main “For You” pages, or create custom feeds around specific topics.
“What we’ve really tried to focus on is: how can we recreate the sense of agency that you had when you were controlling the accounts that you followed, but in a world that still gives you the benefits of recommendations,” such as more easily discovering new content, Instagram’s Vice President of Product Tessa Lyons told CNN.
Advances in AI’s understanding of language make it possible for the platforms to process specific feedback from users about their interests and dislikes, rather than simply making guesses based on what users view and engage with.
“We’re able to do something we’re never able to do before, which is actually enable people to use human language… to say, like, I want to see more of this topic or less of this topic,” Lyons said, adding that previously, “we were not able to accurately enough understand that if you said ‘tennis,’ what the most relevant tennis content was.”
It’s a stark reversal from the approach major platforms had taken in recent years: replacing chronological feeds based on who users followed with algorithmic recommendations. The thinking was that — thanks to the huge volume of data social media companies collect about users through their activity on and off their sites — these platforms could predict better than users themselves what they’d want to see and what would keep them scrolling.
The shift may have been good for business, but users often lamented that lack of control, complaining that the recommendation algorithms could send them down rabbit holes of irrelevant or even toxic content. Platforms have faced particular scrutiny related to their sometimes harmful content recommendations for young people.
That user frustration has only ramped up over the past year as AI has played a growing role in mediating what people see across the internet, colliding with a wider populist backlash to AI, said Tim Weninger, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies AI and social media.
“People have gotten fed up with AI feeding them stuff,” Weninger said. “They miss the old days … They just want to be able to follow what they follow and see the latest updates.”
In 2022, Instagram
<p>Then last June, TikTok “your algorithm,” which lets users see which topics the app believes they’re interested in and add topics they want to see, as well as those they want to avoid. The feature, which was originally rolled out just for the Reels tab, now applies to the full Instagram app and
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