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I have never met a person who wished they spent more time on social media.
And yet, here we all are. A jury in LA recently delivered a damning verdict for Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube. It ruled these platforms are addictive, and deliberately engineered that way. This is being touted as the tobacco moment for social media, a sign that the addiction these platforms cause is being broadly recognized and punished in the courts.
A good way to think of social media addiction is as a fishing hook: you want to move away, but the bait is irresistible and the hook keeps reeling you back. What follows is my take on one of the main hooks keeping people reeled in, a non-drastic solution to limit its hold, and how to try it yourself today.
“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected.”
Social media was, in those early days, a genuinely useful tool, and it spawned one of the most profitable business models in history. But that same business model doomed it from the start, corrupting the original mission of connecting people into a mission of keeping them glued to a screen.
The logic is simple: social media sells ads. More time on the platform → more ads served → more money made. And over the years it has become clear that for these companies, the KPI of “growing engagement on consumer surfaces” is, in practice, best achieved by making users as addicted as possible.
There are many hooks companies have developed to do exactly that — infinite scroll, push notifications, streaks, etc. — but I want to focus on one specifically: the recommender system.
Recommender systems
Recommender systems are a type of algorithm that learns your behavior and preferences and surfaces items most relevant to you. They are one of the backbones of the modern internet, generating playlists on music services, recommending products on e-commerce platforms, and in the case of social media, serving you content you are most likely to engage with.
One of the key turning points in social media’s evolution was when platforms recognized they could dramatically increase engagement by mixing recommended content into feeds that were previously reserved for friends and people you follow. Zuckerberg puts it this way:
“You can think about our products as there have been two major epochs so far. The first was you had your friends and you basically shared with them and you got content from them and now, we’re in an epoch where we’ve basically layered over this whole zone of creator content. So the stuff from your friends and followers and all the people that you follow hasn’t gone away, but we added on this whole other corpus around all this content that creators have that we are recommending.”
This change shifted social media’s mission from connecting people to entertaining them. And it was a huge success — so much so that recommended content is now baked into every major platform, from LinkedIn to TikTok (TikTok especially took this to extremes, its default feed providing exclusively recommended content).
The Unhook - A Personal Example
To give a concrete example of the pull recommender systems have over your daily life, let me share a personal story.
Of all the social media platforms, YouTube was always my guilty pleasure. I spent more days than I’d like to admit going down the rabbit hole and later feeling bad about the time lost and the brain fog that followed. Then, about a year ago, my girlfriend introduced me to a wonderful button buried deep in the settings called “turn off watch history.”
Turning it off changed my homepage from this:
— to this:
And suddenly I found myself reflexively opening YouTube out of habit, only to stare at a blank page and ask myself — why did I open this?
It felt like the hook that had me reeled in had snapped with a simple click of a button. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t stop watching YouTube entirely. I’m still subscribed to channels I genuinely enjoy, but my consumption now feels intentional rather than being mindlessly driven by the algorithm. And the time returned to me is immense.
Your Turn to Slip the Hook
I was genuinely surprised YouTube even has an option to turn recommendations off. In fact, it likely exists because of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which mandates that social media platforms must allow users to opt out of personalised content feeds (I’m not sure people outside the EU have access to this at all).
Now I invite you to try this yourself. Most platforms, for obvious reasons, won’t let you turn recommendations off entirely, but you can get close. Here’s how, for each major platform, as of May 2026.
Mobile: Profile photo → Settings → Manage all history → Controls → Turn off
Also recommended: delete your existing watch history on the same page, or YouTube may still have enough data to serve you recommendations anyway. Note that this won’t affect the recommendations sidebar shown while watching a video. For that, the Unhook browser extension lets you hide it.
LinkedIn
Desktop: Profile icon (top right) → Settings & Privacy → General preferences → Preferred Feed View → Most recent posts
Mobile: Sliders icon (top right of feed) → Settings & Privacy → General preferences → Preferred Feed View → Most recent posts
Instagram
From here on it gets harder. Other platforms don’t offer an explicit way to turn off recommendations, so the best you can do is limit your exposure.
On Instagram, switching to a following-only feed is straightforward but doesn’t stick — you’ll need to do it each session.
Mobile: Tap the Instagram logo (top left) → select Following
Desktop: Select Following (top left)
You can also temporarily suppress recommended posts for 30 days: tap the three dots above a suggested post → Not interested → Snooze all suggested posts in feed for 30 days.
Facebook
No clean option exists here. The closest workaround is navigating to Menu → Feeds, then selecting Friends or Groups to filter out algorithmic content. For more thorough blocking, the FB Purity browser extension gives you significantly more control.
Tiktok
Option 1 — Following feed (all users): Tap Following at the top of the screen to see only content from accounts you follow, in chronological order. Like Instagram and X, this doesn’t stick — you’ll need to switch back each time you open the app.
Option 2 — Turn off personalisation entirely (EU users only): Profile → Menu (☰) → Settings and privacy → Content preferences → turn off Personalised feed. Your For You feed will then show popular content from your region and globally rather than content tailored to you.
Twitter
The Following tab is right there at the top and easy to find on both mobile and desktop. The catch is the same as others: it doesn’t remember your preference and defaults back to For You each time you open the app. You’ll need to switch manually every session.
Turn off by default
The EU’s Digital Services Act gets it half right: it gives users the right to opt out of personalized feeds. But currently platforms just bury the option and few users ever find it. The next step is to mandate that recommender systems be turned offby default for everyone, with the option to turn them on in settings and an explicit warning that doing so carries risks of addiction and mental health harm.
That default matters. It puts the burden of activation on the person who wants the feature, rather than the burden of resistance on the person who might be harmed by it. That asymmetry is small in terms of interface design and enormous in terms of real-world outcomes. We know this from seat belts, organ donation, pension enrollment: defaults are policy.
The person on the other end of that default is often already hooked, and needs every win they can get in fighting off their addiction. And this is already what we practice as a society with cigarettes, which in many countries are hidden from view in stores and must be specifically asked for. A recommendation feed should still be available to anyone who wants it. But turning it on should be a conscious choice, and should come with the same candor we demand from other producers of addictive substances: that this product is engineered to be hard to put down, and that the risks to your mental health are real.
This change, combined with similar regulation of other hooks like infinite scroll, would go a long way in fighting social media addiction. After all, making the world more open and connected doesn’t require an algorithm designed to make sure you never look away.
I have never met a person who wished they spent more time on social media.
And yet, here we all are. A jury in LA recently delivered a damning verdict for Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube. It ruled these platforms are addictive, and deliberately engineered that way. This is being touted as the tobacco moment for social media, a sign that the addiction these platforms cause is being broadly recognized and punished in the courts.
A good way to think of social media addiction is as a fishing hook: you want to move away, but the bait is irresistible and the hook keeps reeling you back. What follows is my take on one of the main hooks keeping people reeled in, a non-drastic solution to limit its hold, and how to try it yourself today.
A quick refresher on how we got here
In 2012, as part of Facebook’s IPO filing, Mark Zuckerberg laid out their mission:
Social media was, in those early days, a genuinely useful tool, and it spawned one of the most profitable business models in history. But that same business model doomed it from the start, corrupting the original mission of connecting people into a mission of keeping them glued to a screen.
The logic is simple: social media sells ads. More time on the platform → more ads served → more money made. And over the years it has become clear that for these companies, the KPI of “growing engagement on consumer surfaces” is, in practice, best achieved by making users as addicted as possible.
There are many hooks companies have developed to do exactly that — infinite scroll, push notifications, streaks, etc. — but I want to focus on one specifically: the recommender system.
Recommender systems
Recommender systems are a type of algorithm that learns your behavior and preferences and surfaces items most relevant to you. They are one of the backbones of the modern internet, generating playlists on music services, recommending products on e-commerce platforms, and in the case of social media, serving you content you are most likely to engage with.
One of the key turning points in social media’s evolution was when platforms recognized they could dramatically increase engagement by mixing recommended content into feeds that were previously reserved for friends and people you follow. Zuckerberg puts it this way:
This change shifted social media’s mission from connecting people to entertaining them. And it was a huge success — so much so that recommended content is now baked into every major platform, from LinkedIn to TikTok (TikTok especially took this to extremes, its default feed providing exclusively recommended content).
The Unhook - A Personal Example
To give a concrete example of the pull recommender systems have over your daily life, let me share a personal story.
Of all the social media platforms, YouTube was always my guilty pleasure. I spent more days than I’d like to admit going down the rabbit hole and later feeling bad about the time lost and the brain fog that followed. Then, about a year ago, my girlfriend introduced me to a wonderful button buried deep in the settings called “turn off watch history.”
Turning it off changed my homepage from this:
— to this:
And suddenly I found myself reflexively opening YouTube out of habit, only to stare at a blank page and ask myself — why did I open this?
It felt like the hook that had me reeled in had snapped with a simple click of a button. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t stop watching YouTube entirely. I’m still subscribed to channels I genuinely enjoy, but my consumption now feels intentional rather than being mindlessly driven by the algorithm. And the time returned to me is immense.
Your Turn to Slip the Hook
I was genuinely surprised YouTube even has an option to turn recommendations off. In fact, it likely exists because of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which mandates that social media platforms must allow users to opt out of personalised content feeds (I’m not sure people outside the EU have access to this at all).
Now I invite you to try this yourself. Most platforms, for obvious reasons, won’t let you turn recommendations off entirely, but you can get close. Here’s how, for each major platform, as of May 2026.
YouTube
Desktop: myactivity.google.com → Controls tab → Turn off (under YouTube History)
Mobile: Profile photo → Settings → Manage all history → Controls → Turn off
Also recommended: delete your existing watch history on the same page, or YouTube may still have enough data to serve you recommendations anyway. Note that this won’t affect the recommendations sidebar shown while watching a video. For that, the Unhook browser extension lets you hide it.
LinkedIn
Desktop: Profile icon (top right) → Settings & Privacy → General preferences → Preferred Feed View → Most recent posts
Mobile: Sliders icon (top right of feed) → Settings & Privacy → General preferences → Preferred Feed View → Most recent posts
Instagram
From here on it gets harder. Other platforms don’t offer an explicit way to turn off recommendations, so the best you can do is limit your exposure.
On Instagram, switching to a following-only feed is straightforward but doesn’t stick — you’ll need to do it each session.
Mobile: Tap the Instagram logo (top left) → select Following
Desktop: Select Following (top left)
You can also temporarily suppress recommended posts for 30 days: tap the three dots above a suggested post → Not interested → Snooze all suggested posts in feed for 30 days.
Facebook
No clean option exists here. The closest workaround is navigating to Menu → Feeds, then selecting Friends or Groups to filter out algorithmic content. For more thorough blocking, the FB Purity browser extension gives you significantly more control.
Tiktok
Option 1 — Following feed (all users): Tap Following at the top of the screen to see only content from accounts you follow, in chronological order. Like Instagram and X, this doesn’t stick — you’ll need to switch back each time you open the app.
Option 2 — Turn off personalisation entirely (EU users only): Profile → Menu (☰) → Settings and privacy → Content preferences → turn off Personalised feed. Your For You feed will then show popular content from your region and globally rather than content tailored to you.
Twitter
The Following tab is right there at the top and easy to find on both mobile and desktop. The catch is the same as others: it doesn’t remember your preference and defaults back to For You each time you open the app. You’ll need to switch manually every session.
Turn off by default
The EU’s Digital Services Act gets it half right: it gives users the right to opt out of personalized feeds. But currently platforms just bury the option and few users ever find it. The next step is to mandate that recommender systems be turned off by default for everyone, with the option to turn them on in settings and an explicit warning that doing so carries risks of addiction and mental health harm.
That default matters. It puts the burden of activation on the person who wants the feature, rather than the burden of resistance on the person who might be harmed by it. That asymmetry is small in terms of interface design and enormous in terms of real-world outcomes. We know this from seat belts, organ donation, pension enrollment: defaults are policy.
The person on the other end of that default is often already hooked, and needs every win they can get in fighting off their addiction. And this is already what we practice as a society with cigarettes, which in many countries are hidden from view in stores and must be specifically asked for. A recommendation feed should still be available to anyone who wants it. But turning it on should be a conscious choice, and should come with the same candor we demand from other producers of addictive substances: that this product is engineered to be hard to put down, and that the risks to your mental health are real.
This change, combined with similar regulation of other hooks like infinite scroll, would go a long way in fighting social media addiction. After all, making the world more open and connected doesn’t require an algorithm designed to make sure you never look away.