Instagram has quietly been shaping your feed for years. Now the company is finally letting you push back.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that a feature called Your Algorithm will soon be available on your main feed. It already works on Reels and the Explore section, but this week’s rollout brings it to the place most people spend the most time scrolling.
What is Instagram’s algorithm control feature and how do you use it?
Your Algorithm is simple: it shows you the topics Instagram thinks you care about, and lets you add or remove them.
Open the feature on your main feed and you’ll see a list of topics the system has figured out you like. Want more fitness content? Add it. Tired of seeing football commentary? Delete it. That’s the core idea.
Right now it only works with topics, but Instagram is working on expanding it to let you control for specific people, moods or vibes (like “relaxing” vs. “energetic”), and content types.
Why does this matter?
For years, Instagram’s algorithm learned what you wanted by watching what you liked, shared, and watched — but you had no way to directly tell it what you actually wanted. The system decided what showed up in your feed, and you either scrolled or didn’t.
Mosseri was unusually honest about this trade-off. “The system learns from what you tap, watch, and share, but you don’t really get to tell it what you want,” he said. “I think this is part of what people feel when they feel uneasy about social media — not the content itself, but the sense that the experience is happening to them rather than being shaped by them.”
That one-sided conversation is what Your Algorithm is meant to fix. Instead of just watching your behaviour, Instagram is now asking you: what do you actually want to see?
How is this technically possible now?
The reason Instagram can show you these topics in plain language is because of advances in AI. For years, ranking systems ran on data that was impossible for humans to understand or explain. Now, large language models (AI systems trained on massive amounts of text) can look at clusters of content and describe them in everyday language.
That’s what makes something like Your Algorithm possible — Instagram’s AI can now tell you, clearly, what patterns it has spotted in your behaviour.
What should you do?
When the feature rolls out to your account, open your main feed settings and look for Your Algorithm. It should be easy to find. Then be honest about what you want: add topics that genuinely interest you, and remove the ones you don’t. The more feedback you give, the better your feed will work for you.
Keep in mind: this is still early. Instagram says it plans to expand this feature significantly over time, including control over specific creators and content moods. For now, topics are the starting point.
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