How to disable news and interest in Windows 11 widget

Here's the problem both Haylie and I are having: You can't simply get rid of the News & Interests widget. There's no dedicated widget to get rid of. There's a ton of individual panes that only ask me to hide them, which results in hiding specific news outlets as "interests" to block.

Please note: At least in my case, I'm not removing anything from my Taskbar. I've hidden the Widget feature from my Taskbar. It's from the Widget window itself that I'm wanting to remove the widget cards of dozens of news outlets out of entirely.

Currently, as of 2023, you can't strictly hide that as a widget or remove it as a widget. Windows forces me to visit My Interests to calibrate that. Allegedly I'm not following anyone. Because of that, it basically throws a bunch of visual vomit in my direction that I couldn't care less about. I don't care about The View. I don't care about whatever self-absorbed celebrity is having a meltdown. I don't want to see any news or "interest" that doesn't actually interest me.

But of course, Microsoft does not care. They want to show me their chosen garbage without my expressed, written consent. Unfortunately, in the Widgets popup window from Windows + W, even if I hide a few news sources, more popup, because golly gee, we gotta fill in that gap!

Oh, and the ONE widget that I DO want? Phonelink? Nope, it's not in the +add widgets section. Even if Phonelink claims it is. I'll have to do more web searching to see if I can somehow manually download and add it. Perhaps some modders out there have created a way to remove what I don't want, lol.

Like you I would be really happy with the local weather and traffic, even local news. But the click bait news is distracting and annoying. The fact Microsoft seems to not want hear consumer customers about what they want in the widgets AND WHAT WE REALLY WANT REMOVED is really disappointing. The constant news feed even download even if you disable or uninstall makes a great product unusable. If they are more interested in pushing advertising at us I am not sure how much I can trust them. I was really liking everything they did since Windows Server 2012. I found your reply about the Windows Web Experience Pack helpful. I might try the Windows 11 upgrade again and see if that fixes the issue. I'll bet the developers don't always have a constant news feed showing them marketing spam while they are working..

I had the exact same problem as you. because I could not remove the News & Interests widgets and uninstalling did not stop the feed I rolled back my Windows 11 deployment and stuck with version 10. The video of the developers explaining how cool it is forcing endless notifications was really terrible. They gave us endless news notifications and no tabbed file browser. This is the only place I know to express my unhappiness over this feature to Microsoft. I'll bet they sys admins to disable it for their domains. Why not give pro and home users that same ability? I came here hoping they made get rid of the news and interests as easy as in Windows 10 in the most recent 11 version. Unfortunately that does not seem to be the case Maybe I will not upgrade till Windows 12.