Instagram won’t unlearn and I can’t grieve in peace.
Instagram won’t help me grieve. My dog was diagnosed with a rare incurable brain disease in mid December 2022. I knew I only had a couple of months with Pixie, so I had to prepare myself for the grieving process. As social media takes a big part of my life, I knew I had to make some changes in my digital world, too.
As of December, I started unfollowing pages about pets, dog daycare's, vet clinics, dogfluencers, and what have you on Instagram. I also started clicking “not interested” or “hide this ad” on all the Instagram and Facebook posts and reels I was seeing on my feed. Three months later, I’m still seeing ads, posts, and reels about dogs.
In contrast, it is fascinating how quickly Instagram learns and responds to recent up-to-the-minute interests via a Google search or a new page follow. Search once for an office desk on Google and you’ll get bombarded with office furniture ads while flipping through your friends’ stories on Instagram.
This poses the question: is it difficult for machines (or algorithms) to unlearn or is it an Instagram failure to adjust to its users’ preferences?
According to Instagram’s Shedding More Light on How Instagram Works, Instagram advises its users on how they can control what they see on Instagram and it suggests exactly what I did: muting or unfollowing people and choosing “not interested” on a suggested post. Accordingly, Instagram promises “We will do our best not to show you similar recommendations in the future.”
I am sure that Instagram will eventually stop suggesting dog-related posts and reels, but why does it have to be so slow? Why should the user wait until the Instagram algorithms understand that a previous interest is no longer an interest especially when we explicitly provide feedback that we don’t want to see more of this?
There are situations like grieving or giving up an addiction that require immediate and strict cut-off from activities or digital engagements for a smoother and more effective moving-on process.
The digital world should be more susceptible to people’s needs and privacy concerns.
There’s an EU proposal for a GDPR regulation about the right to be forgotten. Similarly, we need to fight for our right to change and our right to grieve.
It shouldn’t be an ultimatum between a digital detox or being fully controlled by the social media algorithms.
After all, our interests are “data points” in an AI model. We should have the right to delete our own points.
In other words, we need to start putting more efforts on machine unlearning.