What Happened
The Guardian published a first-person account on 11 September 2026 of a writer switching off their Instagram recommendation algorithm for 24 hours using a little-known feature in the app. The piece describes the experience as a trip back to 2012, before, in the writer’s phrase, everything on the internet was an ad, and sets the experiment against social media reforms in Australia.
The feature is not new. Meta added non-personalised viewing options to Instagram in 2022, including a Following feed that shows posts from accounts you chose to follow in chronological order. What has shifted is regulatory pressure to make those options easy to find. Under the EU Digital Services Act, the largest platforms must offer at least one feed option that is not based on profiling. The UK’s Online Safety Act sets different duties and does not mirror that requirement, so British users generally get these controls because platforms ship them globally, not because Parliament demanded them.
The reach you rent and the audience you own
Every user who switches off recommendations removes themselves from your non-follower reach. You will not see a dramatic overnight drop, and there is no reliable public figure for how many people use the setting. The point is structural: reach that comes from people who never chose to follow you is borrowed, and the user, the platform or a regulator can take it back.
Start by measuring the split. Instagram Insights reports accounts reached divided into followers and non-followers. Pull the last 90 days for each brand account. If most of your reach sits on the non-follower side, your performance depends on a ranking system you do not control and cannot appeal against.
Second, treat the follower count as a staging post rather than the finish line. Email addresses, a CRM record and a sales conversation all survive a feed change. For most UK B2B businesses, the honest measure of social media impact is how many qualified conversations a channel starts, not how many impressions it collects. If you are planning social media management around discovery but reporting on follower growth, the two numbers will keep contradicting each other.
What to check this week
Open Insights, note the follower and non-follower reach split across the last 90 days, then ask what would be left if the non-follower half went to zero. That remainder is your genuinely owned audience and it is the sensible base for next quarter’s planning.
How we plan channels that do not rest on one feed
We open client social work with a blunt question: which part of this reach is rented? We then report follower and non-follower reach as separate lines, because averaging them hides the risk. When a feed change lands, that separation tells you within a fortnight whether the problem is your content or the distribution underneath it.
We are also straightforward about timing. Most B2B social programmes need 3 to 6 months before their contribution to pipeline is readable, and the social media impact worth reporting is the one tied to enquiries rather than vanity metrics. You will hear that at the start, not at month four.
Questions about turning off the algorithm
Can UK users switch off the Instagram algorithm?
Yes. Instagram offers non-personalised viewing options including a chronological Following feed, and The Guardian’s writer used that feature for their 24-hour experiment.
Will this cut my organic reach?
Only the part that comes from non-followers, since the setting changes what recommendations a user sees rather than what their followed accounts post.
Does it affect my paid campaigns?
The feature described applies to recommended organic content. Paid placements are bought and delivered through Meta’s ads system, so plan those budgets on the same basis as before.
Book a conversation about your social channels
If your reporting cannot yet separate follower reach from recommended reach, that is a straightforward fix and a useful one before the next platform change arrives. Get in touch and we will walk through your current numbers and where the real exposure sits.
Written by the London Marketing Company team.
