(Credit: René Ramos)
Just about everything you see in your social media feeds these days is governed by algorithms. Think of them as the digital rules and intelligence that social media companies use to deliver a steady stream of interesting content to your eyeballs. They're invisible conductors that note everything you like, click, or comment on and use that information to serve up more content you're likely to engage with.
Algorithms are far from perfect, though. Sometimes, they pick up on the wrong signals and start to stuff your feed with things you don't care about (or outright hate). If you find yourself increasingly uninterested in the posts you see in your feed, it's often possible to reset those algorithms. Doing it correctly can completely change what your social networks show when you log in.
Here’s how to take back control of your social media.
TikTok
As addictive as it tends to be, TikTok can get stale. That powerful For You page (FYP) will happily display things you don't care about.
There are a couple of different ways to fix this. If it’s just the occasional video in the FYP that you don’t like, hold your thumb down on it, and in the pop-up that appears, select Not Interested. That’ll help, but it won't necessarily impact your feed unless you habitually flag videos you're not a fan of for a week or more.
The problem is a lot of that feed is based on videos you may have previously liked. (When you tap the heart icon on a video and it turns red, that’s a “like.”) You can manually edit your like history by heading to your Profile page, tapping on the heart icon, and then tapping on any video you think might be contributing to the bad suggestions (this un-like will make the heart go back to white).
If you dislike most of the suggestions you see and want to nuke the whole thing and start over, TikTok makes a full refresh easy. On the mobile app, tap your Profile icon at the bottom, hit the three-line hamburger icon at the top, then follow the path Settings and Privacy > Content Preferences > Refresh Your For You Feed > Continue. It will ask you to confirm, tell you that you are refreshed, and offer up a one-question survey on why you did it (in case you were triggered by something you saw).
(Credit: TikTok/PCMag)Remember, your algorithmically curated feed will still be based on things you like and people you follow (among other things), so the FYP may feel the same again after a few months.
To get a full reset, you can unfollow everyone in your Following list (click Profile > Following) and start over. There’s no easy way to do this to everyone you follow at once, so you'll have to unfollow everyone individually. Just be warned: Some users have reported that you can be shadow-banned if you unfollow more than 200 accounts daily. So, if you care about how many views your TikToks get, keep that in mind.
According to one YouTuber, the workaround is to go to Settings and Privacy > Report a Problem, search for an issue like “following,” and when asked to report a problem, tell them you want to unfollow all users. TikTok will probably remove them for you in a day or two.
You can also use this to remove people following you if it turns out that the majority are bots or worse.
Or create a new account. TikTok doesn’t care. It knows you’re probably not going anywhere. Until the government shuts it down again.
YouTube
YouTube feeds you content based on your watch and search history, and your subscriptions. As YouTube says on some pages, “Keeping your history makes YouTube more personal.” But familiarity can breed contempt.
First, reset your Watch History. On the mobile app, tap your name, then click the Cog icon at the top to go to Settings. Go to Manage All History.
(Credit: YouTube)From here, you have a few options. You likely have Auto-Delete (Off) set up—click that, and you can tell YouTube to delete the tracked history of anything older than 36 months, 18 months, or three months. The shorter the time frame, the bigger the reset to your suggestions will be.
Alternatively, click where it says DELETE with a down arrow to access a menu to delete what you’ve seen today, in a custom range of time, or everything for all time. That final one is the nuclear option. Your suggestions will be totally fresh.
While here, click the Saving Your YouTube History link to change what YouTube saves. You may not want it to save searches because you look for wacky stuff. Or set it to turn off any YouTube history saving whatsoever. Scroll down the page to YouTube Customize Your Feed Feedback and click Delete to get rid of videos you specifically picked for your home feed in the past.
(On the desktop, click your avatar at the upper right and select Your Data in YouTube. Scroll down to YouTube Watch History and toggle the On button to Off so your history storage is paused. Click Manage your YouTube Watch History to access the aforementioned menus, like Auto-Delete.)
Clicking "Not Interested" under select videos can also impact the algorithm.
For a genuinely full reset, unsubscribe to every YouTube channel you follow. On mobile, click Subscriptions at the bottom, then click All at the top, and you’ll see the full list. Click the bell icon to the right of each for a menu that includes Unsubscribe. (On Desktop, use Subscriptions > Manage to get to the list with the menus.)
To obliterate all your subscriptions, visit pnuk.co/unsubscribe_all. From there, you can get to the Chrome plug-in that the site says doesn’t work, but reviews (and my testing) show does. It will take you to your
Facebook's main display is called the Feed. It currently features updates, photos, videos, and more from people, Pages, and groups you follow. Facebook’s algorithm ranks posts based on what it believes you’ll like.
Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to adjust the Facebook Feed. Click your avatar profile pic at the upper right on the desktop and go to Settings and Privacy > Content Preference. You’ll see options here to manage your favorites (people/groups you want to see the most), unfollows (people you don’t want to dump but don’t want to see as much of), snoozes (people you temporarily want to unfollow), and reconnect (it lets you turn off unfollows).
(Credit: Facebook)You can also opt to avoid looking at Facebook's main page. Go to Feeds in the left-hand navigation, where you can view only the Favorites, Friends, Groups, or Pages you want to see.
As you use Facebook, make sure to hide, snooze, and unfollow posts as you encounter them to train the algorithm and steer it toward the kinds of content you actually want to see.
You should also change things to impact the advertising in your Feed. Do this with ads as they pop up. Click the X to hide an ad immediately, or use the three-dot menu to hide or report it. You can also limit advertising topics you see by going to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Account Center > Ad Preferences > Customize ads; click “See All” next to Ad Topics.
You can use Page Moderation to block certain words or phrases so they don’t appear, at least in the comments. Go to Settings > Followers and Public Content and find the listing for Hide comments containing specific words. You choose the list of words to block.
Since everything you see on Facebook is tied entirely to who you friend and follow, a complete reset would require you to unfriend everyone. Starting a new profile is more manageable. This is also pretty easy. Click your profile pic to see a button that says See all profiles. In the following menu, it shows + Create new profile or Page. A personal profile is just for individuals, but you can make a new one to get a fresh, clean feed. A page is meant more for a business or organization that multiple people can control. No matter what you create, you can easily switch back and forth between the profiles/pages.
(Credit: Facebook)Instagram is part of Meta, just like Facebook, so many of the same rules we listed above apply. For example, the Ad Preferences/Ad Topics are pretty much the same. Access them by clicking the three-line hamburger menu and going to Settings > Account Center > Ad Preferences.
Insta finally introduced an algorithm reset option. In the mobile app, click your avatar icon at the bottom, then the hamburger menu at the top. Scroll down to find Content Preferences > Reset suggested content.
Manipulate things by clicking the three-dot menu on posts to set the person as an unfollow or to add to favorites. Click into the account of someone you see, and on the Following menu, you can add a person as Close Friend, Favorite, Mute (Posts and/or Stories), Restrict (which limits interaction without a complete block), or Unfollow. Under Settings, you’ll find Muted accounts, Blocked accounts, Close Friends, and other lists you can change as desired.
The best reset option involves opening a new account. Do that by logging out and creating a new user profile. After that, log in to either account, go to Settings > Account Center again, click Accounts > Add Account, and log into the second one. You can link the two accounts (or even a Facebook account) and switch between them at will. Just remember, if you follow all the same people on the new account, it’ll be much like the previous one.
Threads
Threads (another Meta property) will display a For You feed, or just posts from people you’re following (plus stuff you’ve Liked or Saved).
On For You, click the three-dot menu and mark a post as not interested, mute, block, or report a poster. This will give you some more control over what you see.
If you go to Settings via the little two-line menu on the desktop version, you’ll see tabs for Privacy, and at the bottom, there's a link to Blocked profiles. Click that, and it takes you to the Instagram blocked accounts page for your shared account (if you’ve got Threads, you’ve got Insta, and vice versa).
There's also a setting for Hidden words so that you can skip any posts or replies that come in with words, phrases, or emoji you’d prefer to avoid. Add them, separated by commas, to make a blocked-word list.
(Credit: Threads)X (formerly Twitter)
X gives you so little control over your feed that if you want to reset the type of content that the platform serves you, your best bet is to start a totally new account. If that's too drastic for you, try adjusting your existing feed by going to Settings & Privacy > Privacy and Safety > Content You See. This will let you uncheck topics and interests the service believes you’re into. Sadly, you can’t uncheck them all at once. Also, under Privacy and Safety, scroll down to Ads Preferences and uncheck all that.
When using the service, click the three-dot ellipsis menu on any ads you don’t like to block them. Same with anyone you follow whom you’ve lost interest in. If you want to really get rid of everyone you follow to start fresh, go to Following at the top of the feed, hover over every name, and then put your cursor over the Following button so it’ll turn to a red Unfollow. This will take a while if there are a lot of them. If you don't want to do it manually, there’s an Chrome extension called X (Twitter) Mass Unfollow.
Microsoft’s social network for businesspeople (or those looking for work) does a pretty good job of just showing you the people you follow, but it likes to sneak in a few ads based on what it thinks you like. Under your profile, pick Settings & Privacy > Advertising Data > Interests and Traits to uncheck anything you’re not into. Or turn them all off...but of course, then your ads are less relevant. In fact, go through all the “Data collected on LinkedIn” and “Third-party data” entries. If you turn them all off, you’ll get a totally new feed, albeit one that's probably irrelevant.