Filter out opinion‑centric news from Discover/News feed in app

Pavel
Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:55:06 +0000
Feature Requests

Feature Request
Add a content filter for opinion‑centric items in the Discover/News feed in the Perplexity app, allowing users to reduce or hide stories whose main content is “X said Y about Z”.

Problem Statement
In the iOS app (Discover/News feed), a large proportion of items are about what a single person said or thinks (e.g. “Politician X commented on…”, “Elon Musk said that…”).

As a user who primarily seeks evidence‑based information (data, studies, reports, analyses), I’m not interested in consuming quotes and personal commentary — even if they come from Nobel laureates, and especially when they come from politicians or celebrities.

Currently, these opinion‑centric items take up a significant share of the feed, which reduces signal‑to‑noise for users who care more about facts than about who said what.

Proposed Solution

Add a content‑type preference or filter in Discover/News, for example:

A toggle or slider like:

“Fewer single‑person opinions / More data‑driven content”

Or explicit checkboxes:

Reduce stories whose main focus is “X said Y”

Prioritize reports, summaries, datasets, multi‑source analyses

Intended behaviour (examples):

De‑prioritize or hide items where the headline and body are primarily about a single individual’s opinion, quote, or tweet.

Prioritize items that aggregate multiple sources, show data or empirical findings, or summarize events rather than amplify one person’s statement.

Optionally, allow per‑topic overrides (e.g. still show expert commentary in areas I follow, but reduce political soundbites).

This could be exposed in Settings → Discover / News preferences, or as part of a more granular “Content preferences” panel.

API Impact

From the outside it looks like this primarily concerns search / retrieval / ranking filters for the feed generation layer, rather than the chat completions API itself.

API component: internal ranking / search filters used to build the Discover/News feed.

Model‑specific? Potentially relevant to any model used for news ranking or classification (e.g. Sonar Deep Research when curating sources).

Parameters: This could correspond to an internal boolean or categorical parameter, e.g.:

content_style: "factual_only" | "mixed" | "opinion_friendly"

or a numeric preference like opinion_weight in the ranking pipeline.

No changes are needed for external API users unless you want to expose similar controls on the public API later.

Alternatives Considered

Workarounds I’ve tried / considered:

Manually ignoring or scrolling past opinion‑centric items in the feed.

This may slightly adjust personalization over time, but does not reliably remove this type of content.

Using direct chat queries instead of the feed, with prompts like “summarize the facts, ignore quotes and commentary”.

This works for ad‑hoc queries, but does not solve the problem of the push / ambient Discover/News experience, which is where I’d like better signal.

Relying on topic preferences only.

Topic filters (e.g. tech, science) still surface many “X said Y” headlines within those domains.

These workarounds are partial and time‑consuming; they don’t give the user a clear, controllable way to say “I care about facts and multi‑source context, not isolated opinions”.

Additional Context

Use case: I’m an academic / researcher‑type user who uses Perplexity to stay up to date via the Discover/News feed, but wants to maximize fact‑rich, multi‑source content and minimize “soundbite journalism” centered on single individuals.

UX suggestion: even a simple first version — a single toggle like “Reduce opinion‑centric stories” — would already be very helpful. Over time, this could evolve into a more general content‑preference system (facts vs opinions, primary sources vs commentary, etc.).

Thank you for considering this request — I think it would make the Discover experience significantly more useful for users who prioritize evidence‑based information over individual commentary.