Instagram is giving users more ways to control what they see on the platform. The company has announced a couple of new features that allow you to customize your Instagram feed as per your liking. Firstly, it is testing the ability to mark multiple posts as Not Interested. You can select posts that you don’t want to see in the Explore tab and flag them all at once to the app. The selected posts are immediately hidden from your feed. You’ll also stop seeing similar content in the future. The Meta-owned platform currently only lets you do that for individual posts. You can’t flag multiple posts at once.
To flag multiple posts on Instagram, you’ll need to tap a new Filter button next to the search bar in the Explore tab. You’ll see two options there — Not Interested and Sensitive Content. Select either option and mark the posts accordingly. Now tap Done to complete the action. This is much more convenient than the current implementation that requires you to first open a post, tap on the three-dot menu, and select Not Interested. You need to repeat these steps for every content you want to filter out.
Instagram will also soon start testing the ability to filter out content based on keywords. You can create a list of words, phrases, and emojis that will trigger this filter. The app will look for those keywords in a post’s caption or hashtags and remove all related posts from your feed. “Whether you’re seeing something that’s not relevant, or have moved on from something you used to like, you can use this feature to stop seeing content that’s not interesting to you,” Meta said in a blog post. TikTok already offers similar keyword-based filtering of posts.
Instagram adds new ways to filter content as it becomes more like TikTok
Instagram debuted as a photo-sharing app and later added support for videos. But it is now preferring TikTok-esque short videos over everything else. Called Reels, the TikTok-inspired feature is increasingly taking precedence on the platform. Users now see more Reels from accounts they don’t follow, often hiding content from their friends and family. While many have opposed this idea, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that interest-based recommended content is the future of Instagram.
To ensure users don’t see what they don’t want to see, Instagram is adding more ways to filter out content on the platform. These two upcoming features are on top of the existing options to switch your feed between Favorites and Following. You already have the ability to mark individual posts as Not Interested, while there’s an option to snooze suggested posts for 30 days. Instagram also recently updated its sensitive content filters.
2022-08-31 15:05:29