Instagram boss says you'll be able to switch back to a chronological feed this year

• The head of Instagram said the app will give users three options for how they order their feeds.
• One option, named Following, will be chronological, and only feature posts from followed accounts.

Instagram is creating two new ways to organise your feed, Adam Mosseri, the head of the company, said in a video on Wednesday.

Mosseri said the platform will release three distinct options for how Instagram displays feeds in the first half of 2022.

The first one is Favorites, which will prioritise a subset of favorited accounts. The second is Following, which will be a purely chronological feed, only showing posts from followed accounts in the order they were posted.

The third option is Home, which will resemble the feed users see today. This is where Instagram orders posts by how interested it thinks users will be in them as well. It also recommends posts from accounts users don't already follow.

In his video, Mosseri said Home will start making more recommendations over time.

Mosseri said the company is already testing the new feed options and hopes to launch them fully by the first half of 2022.

Mosseri told Senators during a congressional hearing in December the company was working on reintroducing a chronological feed, which it scrapped in 2016.

Mosseri told Senators that the company was aiming to release a chronological feed "early" in 2022, but did not specify a month.

This came after engagement-based ranking, the system Instagram currently uses, came under scrutiny following testimonies from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. She told lawmakers in the US and the UK that engagement-based ranking can lead to algorithms pushing harmful or divisive content, and a chronological feed is safer.

Facebook, which is also owned by Instagram's parent company Meta (formerly named Facebook), already allows users to manually change their news feeds to a chronological ranking.