Facebook is giving users a direct dial for its recommendation engine.
The feature, called Your Algorithm, lets people add and manage topics they want more or less of in their feed and in Reels. Users tap "interested" or "not interested" on individual posts through the three-dot menu, or manage topics directly in a dedicated settings screen. Meta says the feed updates "right away" once you make a change, rather than slowly adjusting over days of inferred behavior. The feature already exists on Instagram, launched earlier this year, and Threads has its own version called Dear Algo.
This matters because it is an admission that black-box recommendation systems have a trust problem. Users have spent years trying to reverse-engineer their feeds through workarounds like hiding posts or unfollowing accounts, with mixed and often invisible results. Giving people an explicit, labeled control is Meta's attempt to make the algorithm feel less like a black box and more like a settings menu - cheap to build, good for the "we listen to users" narrative, and it keeps people inside the app tweaking settings instead of leaving.
Whether it actually works as advertised, or just adds a placebo button that makes little difference to what you're shown, is the open question. Meta rolled out near-identical tools on Instagram and Threads before extending it to Facebook last, which says something about where Meta still considers its engagement problems most pressing.