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

Never ascribe to malice what can be easily explained by incompetence. ESPECIALLY in the IT field.

Top post on page 3 has how to do it.

Hello - I feel like I'm late to the game on this but I wanted to share because I didn't see a clear response with an accurate solution.

My issue was exactly the same as initially described in this posting. I thought of messing with registry key as suggested but I was hoping for a simpler solution.

I was able to open Microsoft Edge, go to the page settings button in the top right hand corner, and uncheck (turn off) all settings on the settings page. I then restarted the laptop and it has not come back since. Not on the taskbar and not in Microsoft Edge. I don't know what the correlation is between the two but it seems like Edge is definitely forcing the reset of the taskbar setting.

Anyway, it was a simple solution. I prefer to go get my own news anyway and don't really use Edge. Hope this helps someone else.

Cheers.

I was able to open Microsoft Edge, go to the page settings button in the top right hand corner, and uncheck (turn off) all settings on the settings page. I then restarted the laptop and it has not come back since. Not on the taskbar and not in Microsoft Edge. I don't know what the correlation is between the two but it seems like Edge is definitely forcing the reset of the taskbar setting.

Thank you, this helped to solve it for me.

This is seriously annoying and useless. There's no reason Microsoft should be turning "News and Interest" back on automatically after the USER TURNS IT OFF.

Either the setting is broken, or it was designed like this. Designed to shove irrelevant "News and Interest" in your face when you THE USER, don't want it. Why have a setting at all if it's not even going to work. It shouldn't be tied to anything else, and it shouldn't be an issue. If THE USER chooses they don't want to see the news, then they shouldn't have that forced on them. This is very scummy. Very Microsoft.

I want to point out something that one the IT's said "We hope you enable/pin News and Interest on your taskbar in the future". This makes me think they don't want to help people get rid of this, and any advice they've sent isn't working. They're probably advised to not help with this, which would make sense as to why they haven't given any reason or solution to why it's happening.

I personally don't like the news, and try not to see the news as much as possible. I use my PC personally to play games and make art. I don't need "News and Interests" in the corner bothering the living hell out of me. I already have ADHD, but **** like that makes it a LOT more difficult to focus.

With scummy "features" like this, you are begging users to hack their PC's or switch OS's. Please, stop being incompetent for once, and MAKE A SETTING THAT DOES WHAT IT SAYS IT DOES.

No matter how much you force something useless on consumers, we wont eat it.

So sick of your ****, Microsoft.