We want to make sure everyone on Instagram – especially teens – has safe, positive, age-appropriate experiences and feels the time they’re spending on Instagram is valuable. In addition to providing built-in protections from sensitive content with Teen Accounts, we want to give teens new ways to shape their Instagram experience, so it can continue to reflect their passions and interests as they evolve.
That’s why we’ve started testing the ability for everyone on Instagram – including teens – to reset their recommendations. In just a few taps, you’ll be able to clear your recommended content across Explore, Reels and Feed and start fresh.
Your recommendations will start to personalize again over time, showing new content based on the content and accounts you interact with. When resetting, you’ll also have the option to review the accounts you’re following and unfollow any that share content you no longer want to see.
We’re excited to partner with organization experts Joanna and Clea from The Home Edit to share tips for parents on how both they and their teens can organize their Instagram accounts, just like they’d organize their homes, taking stock of what they’re looking at every now and then to see whether it still suits them and whether there’s other content they may prefer.
Ways to Shape Your Instagram Experience
This new feature, which will soon roll out globally, builds on the tools we already offer to let people curate what they see in their recommendations.
For example, people can tell us they like the content recommended in their Explore page by tapping the three dots in the corner of the post and selecting “Interested.” We recently announced a new way for teens in the US, UK, Canada and Australia to choose topics they want to see more of – everything from books and travel to cooking and sports. We also offer people ways to tell us what they don’t want to see in their recommendations by selecting “Not interested” from the three-dot menu, or using our Hidden Words feature to hide content with certain words or phrases in the caption.
We also offer a range of tools to help teens shape their Instagram experience, beyond recommendations. For example, teens can switch to a Following Feed to see, in chronological order, content from accounts they follow, with the most recent post first. Alternatively, they can add accounts to a Favorites list so they see content from those accounts more often and higher in their Feed, and they can see a dedicated feed of just their favorites when they want to catch up on their posts quickly.
Features like Close Friends give teens more control over who sees their Stories, while the “Your activity” section in settings lets teens see and manage all their previous interactions in one place, giving them more control over their digital footprint. We also encourage teens to regularly review their following lists, to make sure the accounts they’re following are still accounts whose content they enjoy seeing.
Our Approach to Age-Appropriate Content
We recognize parents are concerned that their teens might see mature or inappropriate content online, which is why we have stricter rules around the kinds of content teens can see on our apps. In addition to removing content completely when it breaks our rules, we take steps to help prevent teens from seeing content that may be sensitive or mature. We avoid recommending it, and in some cases we hide it from teens altogether, even if it’s shared by someone they follow.
Today we’ve published a new page in our Transparency Center, to help parents and teens better understand how this approach to content works. The new page sets out the different layers of protection and provides examples of the types of content we remove, hide from teens only and avoid recommending.
