You can just tell the Instagram algorithm what you want right now

Instagram will allow you to modify what the algorithm shows you in your main feed. Using your algorithm advantage, “you can now see and change the topics we think you’re interested in across all key parts of Instagram.” According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri. For now, the feature will only show topics, but Instagram is working on “supporting people’s requests, different moods or emotions, content types, and more.”

The company is slowly working on giving users more agency over some of the algorithms on Instagram, having already launched the Your Algorithm feature To recap your reels and Explore page. With Wednesday’s announcement, Mosseri is taking the opportunity to get a little philosophical. “This is the beginning of something bigger than just a feature,” Mosseri says. “I think it’s in our interest as a company to empower people to turn Instagram into something that works for them, and people should be able to have a lot of agency over the products they spend a lot of time on. We intend to build a lot of what comes next on that principle.”

While algorithmic recommendations are “a real technical achievement in many respects,” they also have a “cost” in what they have done “to people’s capacity,” Mosseri says, noting that how people interact with systems has become one-sided. “The system learns from what you click, watch, and share, but you can’t tell it what you want. I think that’s part of what people feel when they feel uncomfortable with social media — not the content itself, but the feeling that the experience is happening to them rather than being shaped by them.”

For a long time, Mosseri says, classification models have been “built using technologies that people don’t understand.” However, he now says LLMs can “look at collections of content and describe them in language people understand,” giving Instagram “a way to show the system what it thinks they’re interested in, and a way for them to tell the system what they actually want.”