Clean your feed: Reset your Facebook reality
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Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
Welcome back to our mini-series on cleaning your social media feeds. See earlier installments on TikTok ... Instagram ... YouTube ... and X. Or, watch our explainer video.
Facebook has shaped political discourse, family dynamics and entire news cycles for years. Its algorithm reflects years of your clicks, relationships and habits, so your feed may be showing you a version of the world built from your past.
Why it matters: Facebook doesn't have to be a pit of despair and rage bait. You can reset it. And it's never too late to start.
Here's how to fix your feed:
- Snooze and unfollow: Facebook allows you to hide people you follow or "Snooze" their content. Tap the "..." next to a post you don't enjoy and you'll find a number of options to hide that post, snooze the poster, hide all content from that user or unfollow them altogether.
- Adjust your preferences: Over the political content? You can dial it back. Go to "Settings & privacy," then "Content preferences," where you can reduce the amount of political and sensitive content in your feed. It's also where you can fine-tune who and what you see.
- Remove the pages: This takes a little more elbow grease, but it helps. Go through the Pages you follow and simply unfollow the ones you don't care about anymore. That will likely cut down on posts from random fan clubs and those "I like this hobby" pages that were popular in the mid-2000s, but less relevant now.
- Hide ads and posts: Ads clutter your feed. Click the "..." on unwanted ads and select "Hide ad" or "Hide post" to gradually train your algorithm.
- Refresh your feed: Not liking what you see? Pull down on your mobile phone screen while in Facebook to instantly refresh. New posts should load, giving you something different to scroll.
- Delete the junk: You can clear what off-platform material Facebook uses for your recommendations. Head to "Settings," then "Off-Facebook activity" to remove data from other websites.
The bottom line: Your Facebook feed is a time capsule of your past clicks.
It doesn't have to define your present.
