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How I Set Up My Phone to Resist Social Media Influencers
From the widely memed "Labubu Matcha Dubai Chocolate" slang overload to viral brands that everybody on your timeline seems to go crazy about, the ripple of social media influence can be widely felt in every app you use.
However, there are a few ways to resist the shiny pull of social media content and influencer posts that hook you to viral brands or products, leading you to make unwanted, impulse purchases. Here's what you need to know.
Why the Influencer Trap Sucks
Falling into the void of social media content, featuring colorful, new products and viral trends that everyone hops on, is not exactly easy to avoid, especially when your algorithm pushes this type of content to your feed. The influencer trap can creep up on you slowly, especially with those paid collaboration posts or ads you see on your favorite influencer or content creator's accounts.
These can push you to succumb to impulse purchases or sign up for services that you don't really need (or may even come to hate), just because a trusted voice (who was paid to) tells you how good the product or service is.
As someone who has fallen for this trap and made some bad purchase decisions in the past, I know how frustrating it can be to fall into the influencer trap, but not all hope is lost. Outside of reducing your doomscrolling and screen time, there are a few settings, tweaks, and tools that can help you resist social media's influence on your purchase decisions. Here are the simple hacks that helped me.
Customize Your Social Media Feed
A good starting point to strip your social media feeds of clutter that may push you to make impulse purchases. While keeping an eye on the kind of content and influencers you engage with helps, you can also customize your social media algorithm by marking posts, videos, or Reels with a "Not Interested." This help to curate your feed, but you can also mute (or block) creators or accounts that you don't want to see on your feed.
Reddit, for instance, offers a Custom Feed option that provides good personalization options, which can also be useful in keeping your productive and educational feeds separate from leisure feeds. Instagram lets you add certain accounts to your "Favorites" tab, so these users' posts appear on your home page, and, like with Facebook, you can control the sensitive content on your feed in your app settings. TikTok also offers content preference settings, allowing you to filter keywords, a refresh option for your For You feed to reset your algorithm, and topic management to set your most-liked content.
I've also opted for a YouTube Premium subscription to skip the insistent ads, but if you use a web browser for streaming, you can try a trusted ad blocker for websites that spam unnecessary advertisements.
If you want a break from the influencer doomscroll, use apps like Newsify (iOS, Android), a free reader app where you can scroll through news, blogs, or RSS feeds like you would on a social media feed.
Turn Off Targeted Advertising
A big catalyst for my online shopping choices is targeted advertising on social media and websites, which pushes me to make the buying decision (that I sometimes regret post-buy). The type of content you engage with also plays a part in this, but you can also fix this issue in your phone's settings.
For iPhone, you can make a change to your personalized ads through Apple Advertising. Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising > Personalized Ads and turn it off. This will limit Apple from delivering relevant ads to you (but the number of ads you get remains the same) on apps like the App Store, Apple News, and Stocks. Under Privacy & Security, you can also enable App Privacy Report to get an idea of how often apps use permissions for data you've granted (like location or microphone).
For Android, you can find ad privacy and customization options in your system's privacy settings, where you can select ad topics and app-suggested ads. You can also dig into the settings menus of platforms to use to make advertising less relevant to your interests.
Find a Handy Budgeting App to Track Every Penny
A good way to combat the influence of social media, specifically in terms of shopping, is to use a budgeting app so you can track everything you spend and cut out unwanted purchases. I like to use Dollarwise (formerly Simpler Budget), available for iPhone and Android, to track all my expenses and income for the month. It's a beginner-friendly, free app with neat categories to sort all your transactions.
You can also try an app like Daily Budget (iOS, Android) if you want to track short-term budgets and set a daily spending limit.
Download Eco-Friendly Shopping Apps
It's best to be wary of influencer-backed brands and products for a few reasons, with the most important one being undisclosed sponsored ads. While paid promotions are usually revealed in many influencer posts, you may have come across a few hidden ads, which prevent you from determining how legitimate these brands are.
Some shopping apps can help you learn a lot about your favorite brands, and new ones you're trying to authenticate. A few examples include Think Dirty (iOS, Android), a sustainability app to determine products in cosmetic products, best for avoiding allergens; and Good On You (iOS, Android), an ethical shopping app to discover new, sustainable brands and check ratings for fashion brands.
I also like to use thrifting apps like Depop (iOS, Android) to find good brands and products at reasonable costs. These platforms are also a good solution to try if you're looking to stray away from fast fashion brands.
Set Screen Time Limits on Shopping Apps
If you find yourself drawn to addictive social media content or find yourself spending time online window shopping and want to prevent impulse purchases, try setting a screen time limit or using an app blocker. You can use Screen Time for iPhone or Digital Wellbeing for Android to determine your daily and weekly screen time across apps, limit time spent on certain apps, and add home screen widgets to check your daily screen time.
You can also make use of Focus Modes on your phone to reduce distractions on your home screen and hide shopping or social media apps when you're trying to have an influence-free, productive day.
App blockers like Opal (iOS) and Appblock (iOS, Android) help you set restrictive blocks on any app, which can come in handy for productivity blocks throughout your day. It's important to add that these apps still require willpower, since you can override your own restrictions at any time, but they serve as a handy reminder to help you stay mindful when browsing.
Declutter Your Phone Screen
A ground rule to combat doomscrolling and being sucked into the influencer trap is to declutter your phone as much as possible, so you're not as tempted to spend a lot of time scrolling through content that takes away too much from your time or productivity.
This can start with creating a minimalist home and lock screen; you can choose a simple wallpaper or lock screen, create app folders to sort a large library of apps, add productive widgets to your home screen, and even use an app like Minimalist Launcher (iOS) or Minimalist Phone: Launcher (Android) to turn your phone truly minimalist.
For browsing on an iPhone, you can try Safari's Distraction Control, which will strip websites you browse of unwanted ads and distractions. You can target and remove any unwanted elements from a web page with this (like targeted ads, videos, or banners), which can help you focus better on the content of your web page.
An ad blocker can also help you with the noise on web pages you scroll through.
Manage Location Services for Social Apps
Apart from targeted ad settings, be wary of the data access you give to apps, especially social media apps, where you find the most unwanted influencer or brand content. I've found that disabling location access (and activity tracking across other apps) has significantly reduced targeted ads on these platforms.
Sometimes, location-based content can also be helpful (for example, TikTok has helped me find great hidden gem restaurants and cafés in my city), so it can also help you get better personalized content. Where you want to draw the line in this regard, and for which, is of course a personal choice. You can also limit precise location access for apps or set the app to ask for location access every time.
For Instagram, go to Settings and Activity > Who can see your content > Story, live, and location > Location Sharing and click "No one." This new Instagram Map feature shares your precise location with friends and followers, so disable this for maximum privacy (especially if you have a public account).
Monitor Your Feeds for Changes
Using these tricks has helped me sort out the noise on social media a lot, helping me "deinfluence" myself from unwanted trends, brands, and products. Restricting app access to location and activity tracking goes a long way, but customizing and curating my feed has helped me the most in terms of ridding my feed of unwanted influencer content.
A few other tricks I've been using include following "deinfluencing" accounts and content creators that take away from the doomscroll of viral trends and products, while trying to find sustainable, local brands to shop from. Shopping from small businesses can help you find some great handmade, unique products. I've also been maintaining a short wish list of brands that I find on social media and filtering them into a priority matrix so I can figure out which products are utilitarian, so I can cut down on bad purchase decisions.
My advice is to put some controls in place and don't be afraid to make changes and go harder to rein in social media.
Resisting social media influence can be hard, but these hacks can help your wallet and shopping cart get some breathing space. As you engage and curate your social media feeds, you may also find yourself discovering microinfluencers or local content creators that recommend products/services that fit your niche interests, which is a great way to stray away from the viral, trending waves of social media.