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.

1Use Comments and Message Filtering to Hide Offensive Words or Phrases

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.

2Hide 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:

3Use 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:

If you are under 18, you won’t see the “Sensitive content” option, as it will already be enabled by default.

4Use 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 may use the “Not Interested” option to make Instagram show those types of posts less often. Here’s how:

you’re able to alsosnooze Instagram recommendationsto prevent recommended posts from appearing in your feed at all.

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 cantweak your ad preferences on Instagramto avoid seeing irrelevant ads. Here’s how:

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