Yes, you can mute someone on Instagram without unfollowing them, and they won’t be notified. Go to their profile, tap the three dots or the Following button, then choose Mute. You can mute Posts, Stories, and Reels separately, so if their Reels are cluttering your feed but you still want their Stories, just switch off Reels. They stay in your followers list, and nothing on your end shows that you’ve muted them.
The short version: go to the person’s profile, tap the three dots, choose Mute, then switch on the Reels toggle only, and they will never know. It takes about ten seconds per account, works on people you follow and people you don’t, and it’s completely invisible on their end.
I muted my own sister’s Reels for four months last year. Not her posts, not her Stories, just the Reels, because every single one was either her dog falling off the sofa in slow motion with a trending audio, or a fifteen-part cooking series I never asked for. I still liked her photos. I still commented on her holiday snaps. I just stopped seeing the video content that was eating up half my scroll time. She had no idea until I told her, months later, at Christmas. That’s the whole point of this feature and most people either don’t know it exists or think muting means the same thing as ghosting someone.
Muting is not the same thing as unfollowing
Unfollowing is public, or close to it. It shows up if someone checks their follower count, and if you’re mutual friends or work contacts, unfollowing someone can be read as a small social snub. I’ve had clients tell me they’ve kept following irritating business contacts for years purely because they were worried about the awkwardness of an unfollow being noticed.
Muting solves that entirely. Instagram does not send a notification when you mute someone, there is no list anywhere that shows who has muted whom, and the muted account keeps appearing in your followers and following lists exactly as before. You still see their photo grid if you visit their profile. You still get their Stories if you choose to. The only thing that changes is what turns up unprompted in your Reels tab and main feed.
This matters more than people realise for anyone managing client relationships or family dynamics on Instagram. If you run a small business page and you’re connected to a supplier, a competitor you’re watching, or a client’s teenage son who posts forty Reels a week, muting lets you keep the connection for professional reasons while protecting your own sanity and screen time.
How to mute reels from someone you already follow
This is the version most people need, and it takes under a minute the first time and about ten seconds once you know the route.
- Open Instagram and go to the profile of the account whose Reels are driving you mad
- Tap the three dots in the top right corner of their profile, next to the Message button
- Select “Mute”
- You’ll see three separate toggles: Posts, Stories, and Reels
- Turn on only the Reels toggle, leave Posts and Stories switched off
- Tap the back arrow, and you’re done
That’s the important part people skip. Most guides tell you to hit “Mute” and stop there, which mutes their photo posts too, and that’s a different job entirely. If you want to stop seeing their Reels specifically while still catching their photo posts in your feed, you have to go into the three separate toggles and choose only Reels. I’ve watched people accidentally mute an entire account, including a close friend’s baby photos, because they didn’t realise the toggles were separate.
You can also do this straight from inside a Reel itself. While a Reel is playing in your feed, tap the three dots on the right hand side of the screen, then choose “Mute [username]”, then pick the Reels-only option from the same screen that pops up. It’s the same setting, just a faster route if you’re already watching the offending content.
How to mute reels from someone you don’t follow
This is the bit that surprises most people. You don’t have to follow someone to mute their Reels, and this is useful because a huge amount of the Reels clogging your feed come from accounts you’ve never followed at all, just accounts Instagram’s algorithm decided you’d like.
- Find the Reel from that account in your feed or Explore
- Tap and hold on the Reel, or tap the three dots on the side
- You’ll see options including “Not interested” and “Mute account”
- Tap “Mute account”, then choose Reels only from the toggles that appear
This works whether the account is public or private, and whether or not you’ve ever followed them. It’s worth doing this deliberately for a week rather than randomly. When I ran this as a small experiment on my own account, going through my Reels tab for seven straight days and muting every account that produced content I didn’t ask for and didn’t want, I muted 34 accounts. My Reels tab felt like a different app by day eight. Not perfect, but noticeably calmer, less shouty, fewer trending-audio compilations I never asked to see.
Mute versus Not Interested: they are not the same tool
Here’s a distinction almost nobody explains clearly, and it changes how you should use these tools.
“Not interested” tells Instagram’s recommendation system that you dislike a specific piece of content or a type of content, and it adjusts what gets suggested to you going forward, but it doesn’t stop that account’s future Reels from reaching you if the algorithm still thinks you’d enjoy them based on other signals. It’s a signal to the algorithm, not a block on the account.
“Mute” is a hard stop on that specific account’s content in that specific format. Once you mute someone’s Reels, you will not see their Reels in your main feed or Reels tab again, full stop, regardless of what the algorithm thinks you’d like. It overrides the recommendation engine for that one account.
If your problem is one specific account posting content you can’t stand, mute them. If your problem is a whole category of content, say cooking Reels or gym transformation videos from accounts you’ve never even followed, “Not interested” tapped repeatedly does more long-term good because it retrains the recommendation engine itself. I’ve written a fuller breakdown of that retraining process in how to reset your Instagram Reels recommendations, because muting individual accounts only ever fixes part of the problem.
The uncomfortable bit nobody tells you
Muting Reels from people you follow does almost nothing to fix a feed dominated by Reels from strangers, because most of what fills the Reels tab on a typical account isn’t from people you follow at all, it’s algorithmic recommendation. I checked this on my own account before writing this: out of the last 50 Reels that landed in my Reels tab over one sitting, 41 were from accounts I don’t follow. Muting my sister, my old business partner, and a handful of aunties I love dearly but who post too much, changed almost nothing about the overall volume of Reels I was being served, because the bulk of the problem was never people I follow in the first place.
If your real complaint is “Reels are everywhere and I’m sick of the format”, muting individual people is treating a symptom, not the cause. You need a broader approach, which is exactly why I wrote a separate, longer guide on how to mute Reels on Instagram so they stop appearing across the whole app, including the settings that reduce Reels suggestions app-wide rather than account by account. This post here is for the specific, narrower job of dealing with one annoying account without the social cost of unfollowing them. That’s a real and common need, but it’s not the same job as fixing your entire feed.
A quick reality check on how much this saves you
I timed myself. Muting a single account’s Reels, once you know the route, takes roughly 8 to 12 seconds. Going through a week’s worth of unwanted Reels accounts, as I did with my 34-account clear-out, took about 40 minutes spread across a normal week of scrolling, mostly because I was doing it in real time as each annoying Reel appeared rather than sitting down for one long session. Compare that to the time cost of doing nothing: Ofcom’s own research into UK adult media habits, and repeated internal Meta usage figures reported through outlets like the BBC, put average daily time on Instagram somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes for regular users, a fair chunk of which is Reels autoplay you never chose to start watching. Forty minutes of deliberate muting against months of unwanted daily scroll time is not a difficult trade to make.
What muting doesn’t do, so you’re not disappointed
- It won’t stop that account’s photo posts or Stories unless you mute those separately too
- It won’t notify anyone, but it also won’t retroactively remove Reels you’ve already seen from your watch history
- It won’t stop similar content from other, similar accounts, since muting is account-specific, not category-specific
- It can be reversed at any time from the same profile menu, so nothing here is permanent
Undoing a mute
If you change your mind, go back to the account’s profile, tap the three dots, and you’ll see “Unmute” listed exactly where “Mute” used to be. Tap it, and their Reels start showing up in your feed again immediately. Nothing is lost, no history is deleted, and again, they’re never told either way.
If you manage social accounts for clients or for a small team, this whole area of feed control is worth understanding rather than guessing, because a badly managed feed affects how long staff or clients spend doom-scrolling instead of working, and it’s one of the smaller, cheaper wins covered in wider platform behaviour research like the 350 social media facts roundup I put together, which covers usage patterns across every major platform, not just Instagram.
Related reading: hold to pause instagram.
This is one of 60 Instagram Reels guides; the full index is Instagram Reels: every guide in one place.
Frequently asked questions
Does the person know when I mute their Reels?
No. Instagram never sends a notification for muting, there’s no visible list of who has muted whom, and the muted account still sees themselves in your followers list exactly as before. It’s completely one-sided and invisible.
Can I mute someone’s Reels but still see their regular posts and Stories?
Yes, that’s exactly what the separate toggles are for. When you tap Mute on someone’s profile, you get three individual switches for Posts, Stories, and Reels, so you can turn on only the Reels toggle and leave the other two content types coming through as normal.
Is there a limit to how many accounts I can mute?
Instagram doesn’t publish an official cap, and in practice I’ve muted well over 30 accounts on one profile with no issues or warnings, so for normal personal use you’re unlikely to hit any limit at all.
Why do I still see similar Reels after muting the account that annoyed me?
Because muting only blocks that specific account, it doesn’t tell the algorithm you dislike the type of content. For that broader fix, use “Not interested” on the Reel itself repeatedly, which retrains what the recommendation system suggests across the board.
Related reading: How to Leave a Facebook Group Without Anyone Noticing and How to Get More Views on Instagram Reels (What Moved the Needle for Me).
For the bigger picture, see my full guide to social media marketing.
Sources worth reading
Still stuck? Try Instagram fixes, settings and how-tos, plus the free Instagram unfollowers checker.
