How to disable news and interest in Windows 11 widget

Thats actually a good idea. So add widgets and don't worry about it.

I finally found a less technical solution that works (for me). Adding three other widgets takes up enough to screen space to force the drivel (aka news feed) below the screen.

So I see Weather, and also To Do and Outlook that I don't use so are relatively unobtrusive.

The 'News' widget is still there if I scroll down, but at least it's all out of my sight. (I also turn off Notifications for everything except system alerts, so no 'news', or ads, sneak in that way.)

I was wondering the same. Gosh how is it possible I can't remove this from my OS? I find this very disturbing. I don't need Windows to display news to me

EDIT:

I was able to remove the area with this:

1. Press WIN+R keys together to launch RUN dialog box. Now type regedit and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor.



2. Now go to following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\



3. Select Microsoft key and right-click on it and select New -> Key option. Set the new key name as Dsh



4. Now select Dsh key and in right-side pane, right-click on empty area and select New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value option.



5. Set the new DWORD name as AllowNewsAndInterests and set its value to 0 to disable weather widget feature.

Source: https://www.askvg.com/tip-disable-or-remove-weather-widget-on-windows-11-taskbar/

now the widget area is gone altogether even if Widgets is selected from the Settings app.

This works, but it's very broad solution to what should be a very narrow problem: all we want to to do is remove the News/Microsoft Start feed from the widgets panel, while keeping the rest of the widgets as-is.

I'd be okay with widgets for weather and traffic, but really don't need Microsoft's news feed spamming my desktop.

Someone in Microsoft who's been hanging on since the Active Desktop/Windows 98 days must really have a lot of sway--or, more likely, Microsoft is really addicted to advertising co-pays--because this feature has been shoehorned into almost every version of Windows and MSN at some point in the last quarter-century, and it's getting harder and harder to turn off each time.

Apple seems to get this: they'll let you pick which widgets you see and which you don't. Even Google gets this right in Android, and they sell advertising. Microsoft, please, just let us remove the News feed. If we want it, we'll add the News widget back. Yes, you'll probably make a few less pennies and won't "organically drive users to the Bing experience, resulting in advertising synergies and follow-on adoption" or somesuch nonsense, but please, just stop. If you want us to use Edge and Bing, please stop trying to be a circa-2000 Yahoo!.

There's a reason everyone sets their homepage to Google.com, and this is it.

Again, I like widgets in concept. I'd like to see what developers do with the feature, and can see useful ways to interact with third-party apps and services--a widget that shows my network management system's status, or shows me Downrightnow.com's data, or shows a simple media remote for what's currently playing--but I won't get it because I really, really don't want to hear about the Depp/Heard trial, Dr. Oz, Canadian bikers on parade and/or what the current celebrity diet craze is. It's frankly embarrassing to be doing a screenshare session and have this clutter pop up constantly.