How do I stop "Show news and interests on the taskbar" from turning on?

It makes me sad to hear that there is a team hard at work on something that is only on the way. I've tried to find it useful, but maybe only 1% of the headlines are relevant to me, even after configuring what my interests are. As the tech guy for coworkers and family I can assure you that the only people who have the widget on the taskbar are those who don't know how to remove it. I know the same feed shows up on the New Tab for Edge and on the Android Launcher, which I use. I would remove it from those places too if they were on my way as it is on the taskbar. It takes space on the open apps real state.
It even worries me that corporate may think that it is popular because people don't remove it, when the reality is that they don't know how to, and are too busy to care.

Here's a suggestion to make News and Interests relevant and desirable: Make it a social network client, and let the user choose what social network it feeds from. If I could link it to Facebook, X, Instagram and/or even TikTok, I would not only use it and spend time on it, but I may even enable it on the taskbar.

Bottomline, the algorithm that chooses content is not working. Use one that does.

I have the same issue. And have tried many of the steps listed above including the DISM,exe staps. Nothing has worked.

Well . . . thanks . . . ?

I don't believe this is "inadvertently" happening. This is Gates' push of misinformation and disinformation being spread in his news ticker.

NOT A BUG OR ACCIDENT - AND NO FIX ANYTIME SOON because they're losing control :)

Thanks for the fix!

So I'm having this same issue on three different systems, two of them being windows 10, one being windows 11. These are fresh installs. Something from Microsoft is inadvertently re-enabling the setting. I actually pressed the off button one time and while on the screen, watched it switch back to on, on its own.

Going to try the policy edit method, as having this menu appear on business machines is highly unethical.

edit: taskkilling exploerer.exe and restarting it, would instantly re-enable this setting. Changing the registry key ( HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Feeds\ShellFeedsTaskbarViewMode ) to 2, seems to have solved this. I'll update if this behavior comes back. As a side note, the more and more Microsoft forces unwanted and unauthorized contact to outside services, the less anyone offering support should rely upon sfc and dism to repair these situations. These sorts of interferences from Microsoft have been well documented over the last decade. This isn't a malfunctioning of the system, but an "as designed feature".