While scrolling through your Instagram feed, you might stumble upon content you’d rather avoid. Whether it’s negativity, certain topics, or just an overload of something, here are the five best Instagram features for filtering out content you don’t want to see.

Although Instagram’s algorithm does a good job of removing inappropriate content that violates its community guidelines, it doesn’t catch everything. As a result, you may encounter negative, racist, or offensive comments or DMs from time to time.

Instagram’s comment and message filtering feature can help you avoid this content and create a space that feels safe and positive. Here’s how to enable it.

1. Open the Instagram app and switch to the profile tab.
2. Tap the three horizontal lines in the top right corner to get to the Settings and activity page.
3. Scroll down to the How others can interact with you section and tap Hidden words.
4. Turn on the toggles next to Hide comments, Advanced comment filtering, and Hide message requests to enable automatic content filtering.
5. You can also go to the Manage custom words and phrases menu to hide comments and messages that contain specific words, phrases, or emojis.
6. After adding the custom words, make sure to enable the Hide comments and Hide message requests toggles for them.

2 Hide Suggested Posts and Reels With Certain Words

Similar to comments and message filtering, Instagram also offers the option to hide posts and reels containing hashtags or captions with specific words, phrases, or emojis. Here’s how to use it:

1. In the Instagram app, tap the three-dot icon next to one of the suggested posts and select Manage content preferences.
2. Tap Specific words and phrases.
3. Enter your desired words, phrases, and emojis in the text field and tap Done in the top right corner.

3 Use the Sensitive Content Control Option to Avoid Inappropriate Content

Sensitive Content Control is yet another feature that can help you filter out unwanted content from Explore, reels, and feed recommendations. This includes content that doesn’t violate Instagram’s community guidelines but could be upsetting to some users, such as images or videos of fights, promotions of products like tobacco, or anything sexually explicit.

Here’s how to enable Sensitive Content Control on Instagram to avoid any inappropriate content:

1. Open the Instagram app and switch to the profile tab.
2. Tap the three horizontal lines in the top right corner to access the Settings and activity page.
3. Under the What you see section, tap on Suggested content.
4. Tap on Sensitive content and select Less from the following menu.

4 Use the Not Interested Option to Control Your Feed

Instagram does a decent job of suggesting posts and reels based on your interests, but sometimes the suggestions are not quite right. You might also want to filter out content that isn’t necessarily inappropriate but just doesn’t interest you. In these cases, you can use the “Not Interested” option to make Instagram show those types of posts less often. Here’s how:

1. In the Instagram app, scroll through your feed or the Explore page until you find a post about a topic you don’t want to see.
2. Tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the post.
3. Choose the Not Interested option so that Instagram shows fewer posts like this.
4. Optionally, tap Don’t suggest posts from [account name] if you don’t want to see any posts from that account.

You can also snooze Instagram recommendations to prevent recommended posts from appearing in your feed at all.

5 Manage Ad Interests in the Instagram App

Although Instagram uses sophisticated algorithms to target ads, you’ll inevitably see some irrelevant ones that don’t align with your interests or needs. Thankfully, you can tweak your ad preferences on Instagram to avoid seeing irrelevant ads. Here’s how:

1. Open the Instagram app and head to the Settings and activity page.
2. Go to Account Center > Ad preferences > Ad topics.
3. Tap the View and manage topics button to see ad topics Instagram thinks are relevant to you.
4. Scroll through the list to select an ad topic you want to see less of, and then select See less. Repeat this step for all the ad topics you don’t want to see on your feed.

Using these Instagram features should help you filter out most of the unwanted content on Instagram. Additionally, you can also take steps to change what appears on your Instagram Explore feed.