Keep your algorithm to yourself

My friends are poisoning my social media feeds.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

You know who you are. —Kate

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The secret to enjoying life online boils down to one simple piece of advice: Protect your peace. Mute words, block bad posters, unfollow the person you only met briefly years ago on a work trip. It’s an algorithmic world, and anything you let into your orbit is what Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter will use to inform what they funnel into your feeds. But these days, the biggest threat to my algorithm is not the person I hate-follow or the weird rabbit hole I once went down. It’s my friends. 

While we’re aligned on the most important things to friendship, in terms of the internet, my group chat is a mixed bag. I use social media for lifestyle inspiration, while my friend Rachel is just there for the animal videos. My friend Abby, on the other hand, scrolls TikTok for Trisha Paytas updates, and my sister Julia? She watches some of the most bizarre and harrowing Reels to ever grace my screen.

I know this because she sends them. Relentlessly. “How I somatically patterned a $12k sales week into my body”; “STOP SCROLLING! Jesus wants to heal STOMACH’S [sic] NOW! ; the entire account of a woman who eats dirt. They all read like the spam ads that cluttered the websites I’d use as a teen to illegally watch Skins, but were actually made by real, human people in 2024.