You can finally press ‘reset’ on your Instagram feed. Here’s why you should.

Geoffrey A. Fowler

Updated 26 January 2025 at 10:06 am·6-min read

Instagram has released a long-promised "reset" button to U.S. users that clears the algorithms it uses to recommend you photos and videos.

Does it ever feel like your social media feed just doesn’t get you? Or that it keeps leading your kids down unhealthy rabbit holes?

You don’t have to put up with it anymore.

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Instagram has released a long-promised “reset” button to U.S. users that clears the algorithms it uses to recommend you photos and videos. TikTok offers a reset button, too. And with a little bit more effort, you can also force YouTube to start fresh with how it recommends what videos to play next.

It means you now have the power to say goodbye to endless recycled dance moves, polarizing Trump posts, extreme fitness challenges, dramatic pet voice-overs, fruit-cutting tutorials, face-altering filters or whatever other else has taken over your feed like a zombie.

Right now, many people are fed up with Instagram and its owner Meta - for filling our apps with junk, for ending fact-checking and for the behavior of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Resetting my algorithm made my Instagram less annoying without taking the ultimate step of deleting my account. A fresh start is also what the doctor ordered for me and my family’s mental health.

I know some people love what their apps show them. But the reality is, none of us are really in charge of our social media experience anymore. Instead of just friends, family and the people you choose to follow, nowadays your feed or For You Page is filled with recommended content you never asked for, selected by artificial-intelligence algorithms.

Their goal is to keep you hooked, often by showing you things you find outrageous or titillating - not joyful or calming.

And we know from Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen and others that outrage algorithms can take a particular toll on young people. That’s one reason they’re offering a reset now: because they’re under pressure to give teens and families more control.

“Sometimes we make mistakes,” said Instagram head Adam Mosseri in a video announcing the reset button last year. “Sometimes you might end up in a pattern where you just make Instagram unintentionally into something you do not really love.” (Nice of him to blame us for that, rather than Instagram’s software.)

So how does the algorithm go awry? It tries to get to know you by tracking every little thing you do. It’s not just likes and shares - they’re even analyzing your “dwell time,” when you unconsciously scroll more slowly over certain posts.

But it doesn’t actually understand your mind. One friend, who’s the mother of a toddler, noticed her Instagram feed was being taken over with smut about parents’ desperate strategies to find private time to do the hokey pokey. Turns out, this is actually a content niche.

For me, an Instagram account I made to share baby photos of my son turned into a fear machine when he was about a month old. It increasingly began showing images of babies with severe and uncommon health conditions, preying on my new-parent vulnerability to the suffering of children.

I called for Instagram to let us press reset when I wrote about my nightmare feed in 2022. Now we finally can.

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What you need to know about how a social media reset works

An algorithm reset isn’t the solution to all of our social media problems, but it’s better than what has come before.

When you do the reset on any of your accounts, the recommended content in places like Instagram’s Feed, Explore tab and Reels or TikTok’s For You Page will no longer be tailored to your past behavior.

You’ll still see content from friends and accounts you’ve previously chosen to follow. If part of your problem is that you don’t like who you’re following, Instagram will also give you the chance to unfollow a bunch as part of the reset process.

Just know that once you press reset, you can’t undo it. “It’s going to make your Instagram much less interesting at first,” warned Instagram’s Mosseri when he announced the reset button.

Counterpoint: You might also see “less interesting” as a good thing. The more likely you are to stop scrolling and put down your phone, the more likely you are to talk to friends, read a book or take a nap. (Free your mind, and the rest will follow.)

Doing a reset also won’t stop Instagram, TikTok or YouTube from trying to recommend more content you didn’t ask for. They’re just going to start fresh and tailor your algorithm in new ways.

After I pressed reset on Instagram, most of the targeted problematic content I used to see was gone. Instead, my Explore page was filled with generic Instagram trash. But I could see it trying to adapt pretty quickly, for example, offering up more dog content after I watched more dog videos. Instagram says you can send it signals for what kind of algorithm you would like by actively tapping like and watching certain content to the end. (You can also press reset again every time it starts to get annoying.)

For my friend with the racy Instagram feed, she still saw “weirdly sex-oriented” content recommended after pressing reset. It’s possible that’s because Instagram was basing her new algorithm on accounts she has followed that sometimes include that kind of content.

A cynical point of view is that doing a reset allows the tech companies to become even better at preying on us, because they’ll be able to test different algorithms on you.

Also know that a reset won’t actually force Instagram to delete your old data - only deleting your whole account can do that. Nor will pressing the algorithm reset button do away with all of the data they use to target you with ads.

For YouTube, a reset involves deleting the history of videos you’ve watched in the past. That’s one of the major signals that YouTube uses to make future recommendations. You can even turn off your YouTube history going forward, so its algorithms won’t have the data to try to interpret your interests.

If you’re not ready to totally say goodbye to your algorithm, there may be other things you can do to tailor your experience. Many social media apps let you nip and tuck around the edges of your algorithm by tapping buttons to say you like or want to see more or less of certain topics. TikTok has a slider, in settings, to request more or less dance, fashion, nature or pets. On YouTube, if you click “like” on what you do like, its algorithms should listen. (Some people even turn shaping their algorithms into an art - there was one guy who crafted an Instagram that recommends nothing but eggs.)

If, like me, what you really want is social media that only features the stuff you followed, you can kind of hack your way into it. There’s another Instagram setting under “Content preferences” called “snooze suggested posts in feed” that tells the app to stop recommending content there for 30 days. You just have to keep going back to press it again every month. This, sadly, is what counts as putting users “in control” these days.