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4th March 2024
03:24pm GMT
You can just be going for a scroll, having a somewhat mundane day and all of a sudden you find your mind tangled with insecurities you didn't even know you had.
You could have maybe cast an eye over a video about "reducing belly fat" (you can't spot reduce fat but I digress) and all of a sudden it seems everything recommended to you is about how to "shed those pounds," or "grow your glutes in five easy steps."
The diet industry is massive and it's where a lot of influencers and advertisers can make big money if they so wish.
Even if you accidentally like or watch one of these videos all the way through you'll end up seeing more of the same whether you want to or not.
Social media companies have found themselves in hot water over the years pushing the idea of a perfect body on their users so much so that they had to take action.
Meta and Google have rolled out tools that purport to give users more control over the ads or algorithmic content they see but not all of us know about them.
So if you're not in the mood for seeing unsolicited 'Thinspo' on your feed, here are some things you can do.
Go to your profile and tap the menu icon with three lines in the top right corner.
Select Settings, then Ads and then Ad Topics. Search for "Body Weight Control," then choose "Show less ads about this topic."
From here you can continue inputting terns into the search bar for example, "diet" and "fitness" until you've managed to cover all your bases.
For recommended content, tap the three dots in the upper right corner of a recommended post.
Select "not interested, " and then, choose "don’t suggest posts with certain words." This will let you filter out posts with particular terms or hashtags in the caption, in this case, words related to weight loss.
Keep in mind these keyword filters won’t catch all the content you’re trying to avoid some rather clever people have found ways around this such as posting #WL instead of #weightloss so just be careful.
To control what types of ads you see, go to your profile and tap the menu button with three lines in the top right corner.
Select "settings and privacy,'" then scroll down to “ads.” From here tap on "how your ads are personalised" and check if any of your inferred interests are diet or exercise-related.
If so, tap on that interest and select “turn off.”
To adjust your recommended videos that show up on the for you page, return to "settings and privacy" and scroll down to "content preferences." Choose "filter video keywords," then add the words related to weight loss.
On a mobile device, tap the menu button with three lines in the bottom right corner.
Go to the clog icon in the top right corner to access your settings. Scroll down to the "permissions" section and tap on "ad preferences." Tap on "ad topics" at the top, use the search bar to find "body weight control" and tap "show less ads about this topic."
On top of this search fitness, weight and diet and turn off as many of these categories as possible.
For recommended content, tap the three dots in the top or bottom corner of a recommended post and select "show less."
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