User Control: How to Shape Your Experience on Meta’s Platforms

UPDATED MAR 2, 2026
At Meta, it’s important to us that you have the ability to shape your own personal experience across our platforms. Our algorithms on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads aim to help you connect to content and creators you find valuable. We want you to be in charge of the types of content you’d like to see, the ways in which you’d like to interact with other accounts, and how you want to use your time on the platform. We’ve developed user controls to help you inform your experience on our platforms.
Though the exact controls available vary by region and device type, below is a snapshot of the content, account interaction, and time management controls we offer to people. This does not encapsulate the privacy and ads controls provided, or controls available only to people below the age of 18 that they can choose themselves. We have different options available for youth, which you can learn about here.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Control the types of content you see
Customize your feed
Control which accounts can interact with you, and how
Decide how you spend your time on the platform
Tell us when you think something or someone has violated the Community Standards
Shape the types of content you see
  • “Interested” or “Not interested” - When a post is recommended in your feed, Reels, Explore or Search, you can indicate whether you are interested or not interested in that post. This informs our recommendation systems, which take into account that feedback.
  • X-out - If you want to remove content from your Facebook Feed, you can tap the X in the upper right corner of the post to hide it from your feed; doing so will train our systems to deliver fewer posts like it in the future.
  • Hide posts that contain words or emojis you don’t want to see - You may not want to see posts with certain content, and you can customize your “Hidden Words” list to hide specific types of posts. For example, if you are vegetarian, you can hide suggested content that contains hashtags or captions with words like “meat”, “steak”, “​​🍗”, or “carnivore diet”.
  • Snooze suggested posts in your Feed - You may want to stop seeing posts we suggest to you in your feed for a limited time, so we make it possible to “snooze” recommended posts for 30 days.
  • Sensitive Content Controls - You can indicate how much sensitive content (e.g., graphic content or content involving nudity) you are comfortable seeing in your recommendations.
  • Political Content Controls - People have different preferences for viewing political content on social media. That's why we have a control that lets you decide whether or not political content (posts that are potentially related to things like governments, elections or topics touching on certain social issues) is recommended to you.
Customize your feed
  • See content in reverse chronological order - You can choose to toggle to a feed that will rearrange posts so you see the most recent content posted by accounts you follow in reverse-chronological order.
  • Favorites Feed: You can select a subset of accounts that you follow to be your favorites, ensuring that you don’t miss posts from these accounts.
  • “Your Algorithm” / “Dear Algo” - You can shape what you see on your algorithm by directly inputting your preferences for interest topics you would like to see more or less of.
  • Blend - You can invite your friends to create a unique shared feed of Instagram Reels based on content we suggest for each participant.
  • Friends Tab: On Facebook, you can toggle to a feed that allows you to see updates from your friends. On Instagram, you can select the “Friends” tab in Reels to see reels content your friends have liked, created, reposted or commented on.
  • Custom Feeds: You can create a custom feed on Threads to see posts about certain topics you select or from specific people.
Control which accounts can interact with you, and how
  • Mute/ Snooze - This allows you to hide someone’s posts, stories, or messages in Stories and Feed while still following the account.
  • Block - When you block someone, they can no longer search for your profile, view your content, or send you messages.
  • Restrict- You can select certain accounts who won’t see when you’re online, and you won’t receive notifications for their comments. Choosing to restrict an account will not alert the restricted person.
  • Limits - You can temporarily limit interactions from certain groups of people on Instagram without them knowing.
  • Hidden Words – Automatically hide comments and DM requests you don’t want to see by turning on “Hidden Words” and “Hide message requests.” You can also choose custom words and emojis to add to your Hidden Words list.
Decide how you spend your time on the platform
  • Daily Time Limit - You can set a reminder to let you know when you've spent a specified amount of time on our apps throughout the day.
  • Sleep Mode - You can turn on sleep mode to make sure you don’t receive notifications during indicated sleep hours.
Tell us when you think something has violated the Community Standards or you think we’ve made a mistake
  • Report – you can report accounts, comments, messages, reels and posts that you think have violated the Community Standards for us to review.
  • Appeal - If you disagree with a content decision Meta has made, you can request an appeal.