Your Feed Is Curated. Your Comments Are Too.

When you’re scrolling through social media, sometimes you’ll see something that makes you curious about what everyone else has to say about it. Maybe it’s a creative ad. Maybe it’s a cute animal. Maybe it’s something a little more controversial.

So you open the comments.

It feels like you’re getting a look at the general consensus around the post. You have your own reaction, but then you start reading what other people have to say. And more often than not, those first few comments might make you feel pretty validated. Someone else had the same reaction you did. Someone makes the exact point you were thinking. You start thinking, “Yep, other people see it the same way I do.”

But here’s the weird part: you might not actually be seeing the same conversation as everyone else.

And for marketers and communicators, that matters. Those first few comments can influence how someone interprets the content they just saw and the conversation happening around it.

We already know social platforms curate our feeds. The posts that show up in front of us are influenced by what we watch, click, like, share, search for, and spend time looking at.

What gets less attention is the fact that platforms can also curate the comment sections underneath those posts.

We Might Not Be Seeing the Same Conversation

What does this look like? Two people can open the same post’s comment section and see different comments at the top.

This is supported by 2026 research into both Instagram and TikTok. This Instagram study found variation in which comments appeared and how they were ranked across different accounts. TikTok researchers similarly found that comment rankings differed between accounts for some videos, with evidence that personalization could affect comment exposure. 

Neither study found that this happened universally, though, and both point to a more complicated picture that can vary depending on the platform and context.

So, What Are We Actually Seeing?

Think about it this way. Say you’ve trained your TikTok feed to show you a lot of content about cats. You come across a video of a dog and open the comments. You might notice comments from people who prefer cats over dogs. Someone else could open that exact same comment section and instead see a bunch of people agreeing about how cute the dog is.

That can create a feedback loop. If the first few comments you see agree with your own reaction, you may feel validated in what you already thought. And once you see other people making the same point, it can be harder for a different perspective to break through.

Research on online comments has found that when comments agree with the original post, readers can perceive greater consensus among other people viewing it. In other words, the comments can make an opinion feel more widely shared than it might actually be.

I’ve noticed a version of this in my own TikTok feed. I’ll come across a clip from one of my favorite shows, open the comments, and suddenly I’m reading a whole conversation about my favorite character. It feels like I’ve found my people.

Someone else watching that same clip might be interested in the soundtrack and see people talking about the music. Someone interested in the costumes might notice a conversation about what a character is wearing.

The comments themselves haven’t necessarily changed. What changes is which part of the conversation gets your attention, and that can shape how you understand what you’re seeing.

If the first ten comments you see all agree with your interpretation, it can be easy to assume that everyone feels the same way. If the comments you see are critical, you might come away with a very different impression.

Why This Matters for Communicators

This becomes especially interesting when we start thinking about brands and organizations.

Likes and follower counts are easy numbers to look at, but the conversations happening around your organization can tell you something those numbers can’t.

What are people saying about you? What questions or misunderstandings keep coming up? What are people responding positively to? And which parts of those conversations are actually being surfaced to the people looking at your posts?

The answer isn’t always straightforward. Each platform has its own approach to ranking comments, and the signals can vary. The research in this area is still developing, too. As these algorithms continue to evolve, we can probably expect to learn more about how they shape the comment sections we see.

That makes it even more important to be clear and consistent about what is true for your brand. You can’t control which comments people see or what opinions they form, but you can make sure your own content consistently reinforces who you are, what you do, and what you want people to understand about your organization.