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Instagram has shared details in a blog post about how it uses AI and machine learning to choose content for different users.

The app prefers recommending accounts that the user would like instead of individual posts.

“This is the first time we’re going into heavy detail on the foundational building blocks that help us provide personalized content at scale,” Instagram software engineer Ivan Medvedev told The Verge over email.

Instagram is a platform on which content of different kinds is showcased. Everything from slime to calligraphy exists on the social app. This creates a challenge in shortlisting content for each user according to his or her interests.

The Instagram algorithm focuses on showing likeable accounts and not separate posts.

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Machine Learning Method: Word Embedding

Using the word embedding method of machine learning, Instagram finds accounts which are similar to each other.

This method analyses the order in which the words appear in a text to study how related they are.

For instance, the word ‘rain’ is more likely to appear with ‘weather’ or ‘day’ and less likely to appear with words like ‘clothes’ or ‘sandwich’.

How Instagram Uses AI for the Selection Process

The algorithm first checks the accounts that the user has interacted with recently and begins the search from here.

Then it goes on finding similar accounts and selects 500 pieces of content. The posts get filtered, spammy/misinformation/policy-violating content is removed.

The remaining posts are then sorted with the likeliness of the user to like or comment on them. Top 25 of these are shown on their explore tab.

The blog post doesn’t explain how the spammy and policy-violating content is filtered out from the rest.

Medvedev says the company is working on it. “We are also training AI models to proactively detect vaccine misinformation and take automatic action,” he says.

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Modify what content you see

To make Instagram show you the content you want to see, all you have to do is interact with such content.

Either like, comment or share these posts. This way similar content will find its way to your explore tab. If there are certain posts which are not to your likings you can tap on the three-dot menu on the top-right and select ‘see fewer posts like this’.

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