Are you involved with social media so you can hear all sides of an argument? Do you want to get even the most outrageous and controversial of perspectives in your Instagram and Threads feed? Then you need to make some changes to your default settings…
One of the great challenges of the social media universe is finding the balance between filtering content to the point where you’re in an echo chamber of similar perspectives and having a firehose of hate and crazy perspectives blasted out of your screen. To date, most social media sites have done a poor job of this task, essentially saying “we just share what people post” and allowing us to instead follow or ignore (or block!) based on content and perspective. Then these same sites offer up “Recommended” posts from people and organizations we don’t even follow!
Meta, managing Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WeChat, has quite a testbed to explore different ways to allow us users to filter our content because what if someone has funny memes they post and also occasionally share far-out conspiracy theories? Reflecting that, both Instagram and Threads (Meta’s Twitter-like alternative service that increasingly is hard to differentiate from Insta itself) (but that’s another story!) now have some really interesting content filtering options, including the ability to limit how much “political” content appears in your feed.
Note: I put quotes around “political” in the previous sentence because it’s definitely something that’s up for debate. Who decides what’s political? How do they ascertain if it’s political but in obvious alignment with your views or diametrically opposed?
What might concern some people who are adamant fans of the “I want to see it all, even the wacko, hateful stuff!” school of free speech is that Instagram and Threads now defaults to filtering out some of the political content you’d otherwise see. But you can change it…
INSTAGRAM SETTINGS & PRIVACY
Start by grabbing your mobile device and launching Instagram. Don’t get distracted by the latest posts!
Instead, tap on your profile icon on the bottom right – it’s a tiny round profile pic – then tap on the three horizontal lines button on the top right of the profile info page. Now, from the subsequent menu, tap on “Settings and privacy” to get to this point:
Hopefully, you’ve visited this area before because it really is up to you to ensure all of the privacy and security settings are correct and match your preferences.
Scroll up as needed to find and tap on “Content preferences“. That’s where we’ll spend the rest of our time in this tutorial.
INSTAGRAM CONTENT PREFERENCES
The Content Preferences is probably an area you haven’t visited before and there’s a lot to consider:
Ever specified that you’re interested or uninterested in specific themes or topics? Here’s where you can review what you’ve specified and update it as desired. Don’t care a whit about Dubai politics? You can specify that here. Really into F1 racing? You can add it to your interested list.
Perhaps more interesting is that you can specify words or phrases that are an immediate block for you. Absolutely can’t stand the debate around Kamala Harris and her accomplishments – or lack thereof – as Vice President of the United States? You could add her name to the “Hidden words and phrases” section.
The more important sections are Sensitive content and Political content. Let’s start with the latter. Tap on “Political content“.
INSTAGRAM POLITICAL CONTENT: LIMIT?
You might be surprised that the default setting for this is “limit”, as shown:
Notice the small print on the bottom:
“This affects suggestions in Explore, Reels, Feed Recommendations and Suggested Users. It does not affect the content from accounts you follow. This setting also applies to Threads.”
That’s a lot to unpack from a few sentences, but I would suggest that the most important point is that it does not affect the content from accounts you follow. In the earlier example, if you follow someone who has lots of great posts and an occasionally inflammatory political post, you’ll see ’em all. Also note that this refers to “political and social topics” which leads to the obvious question “like what??”
Anyway, this is a setting you might leave as “Limit” to try and improve your user experience or you might choose “Don’t limit” and see how that goes for a while. Now you know where it’s located, you can always change things up if it’s just too much for you.
INSTAGRAM SENSITIVE CONTENT: LIMIT?
Back up and choose “Sensitive content” and you’ll see a lot more information than was offered with the political content option:
Again, this is primarily related to search results and recommended content, it won’t filter out awful posts from friends and family. In this case, Meta also actually defines what it means by sensitive content too; perhaps that’ll eventually be included with the political content option?
Tap on “Continue” to get to the actual settings:
In this case, there are three possible settings, with the default being the moderate “Standard” setting. Again, notice that this applies to your Threads account (if you have that set up) in addition to IG.
Which is best for you? I’ll let you make the call.
INSTAGRAM: REDUCED BY FACT CHECKING
Go back to the “Content preferences” screen and you’ll notice a bit further down that there’s an option for “Reduced by fact-checking”. Tap on it.
This one’s also really interesting and if you’re the type that’s skeptical of the fact checkers and are suspicious of their motives and funding, well, you’ll probably want to choose “Don’t reduce”. If you trust them (and you probably should) the default of “Reduce”, or even “Reduce more” might be the best option for you.
As Meta explains:
“Content reduced by fact-checking has been reviewed by independent fact-checkers and found to contain false or partly false information, altered content, or missing context.”
In an election year with AI becoming better and better at manipulating images, audio, and even video content, relying on a third party in this regard might be the smart move. You decide.
Everything we’ve considered influences both your Instagram and Threads experience, which is also worth remembering. Still, a few taps and you’ll be able to better tune your own experience!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Instagram for quite a while and am just starting to document Threads. Please check out my Instagram help library while you’re visiting and why not follow me on Threads too? Just look for @d1taylor to find me there!