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, share, 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 the wrong signals and start stuffing 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 can be, TikTok can get stale (maybe more so now that it’s owned by a US-based conglomerate). 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.
The problem is that 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 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 revert to white).
If you 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 end up feeling the same again after a few months.
To get a full reset, unfollow everyone in your Following list (click Profile > Following) and start over. There’s no easy way to do this for everyone you follow at once; 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 own TikTok vids get, keep that in mind.) You can also pay for a third-party service to do this. Or just create a new account from scratch.
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 You at the bottom, 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⌄ to open a menu to delete what you’ve seen today, in a custom time range, or everything for all time. That final option makes your suggestions 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 to pause history storage. 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 from 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, go to All Subscriptions for the same list.)
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 Feed Channels page, where you can remove each sub, step by step. After that, delete the plug-in. (If the plug-in isn’t working, a workaround on that page will help you.)
Facebook’s main display is called the Feed. It 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 in the upper right on the desktop, then go to Settings and Privacy > Content Preferences. 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 (which lets you turn off unfollows).
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(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 select to 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. The three-dot menu on each post offers an option to “Show Less” of certain kinds of posts. You can also Clear Video Watch History and Search History in the Activity Log.
You should also make changes to affect the advertising in your Feed. Do this as ads 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 account is more manageable; just use a different email or phone number to set it up. There’s supposedly a way to create an entirely new profile tied to your current Meta (Facebook) account, but as of this writing, I can’t access it on desktop or mobile.
Instagram is part of Meta, just like Facebook, so many of the same rules 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.
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Click the three-dot menu on posts to unfollow or add a person 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 is to open 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 in to 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 will 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 is 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
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, try adjusting your existing feed by going to More > 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 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 a Chrome extension called X (Twitter) Mass Unfollow.
Microsoft’s social network for businesspeople (or those looking for work) used to do a pretty good job of just showing you the folks you follow, while sneaking in a few ads based on what it thinks you like. As of 2026, the profile is now more “interest-based,” so you’ll see plenty you’re probably not actually interested in.
On the desktop, there’s small text at the top of your feed that says “Sort by: Top,” which you can click to change to “Sort by: Recent” so you’re seeing newer posts from your connections, not just what LinkedIn says is the tops. To make it permanent, go to Me > Settings > Preferred Feed View and select “Most recent posts.”
Under your profile, pick Settings & Privacy > Advertising Data > Interests and Traits to uncheck anything you’re not into. Or turn them all off. Of course, then your ads are less relevant.
The key to your algorithm in LinkedIn is to aggressively smash that three-dot menu next to posts you’re not into and say, “I don’t want to see this.” When it asks why, just answer with the “not relevant” option. Also, click My Network > Followers and Following, and you can even unfollow people you’re linked with to cut down the noise.
About Our Expert
Eric Griffith
Senior Editor, Features
Experience
I’ve been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers’ Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).
I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it’s not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I’d have a future.
In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST (“an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale,” according to Publishers’ Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.
I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.
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