Microsoft is now rolling out their News and interests taskbar icon, which was announced back in April on TechCommunity.
I’ve seen this turn up in the last day on both my home PC and work PC – the work PC being configured to get updates immediately from Windows Updates for Business.
If you don’t want this at all, you can disable via Group Policy or Intune.
Group Policy
If you want to disable this with a Group Policy setting, you’ll need to get the latest ADMX files updated 7th May 2021 from Microsoft. These will contain a new ‘feeds.admx’ policy definition file, but it’s just a single enable/disable setting:
You can do either of the registry settings recommended by Ben below – the first being a user config setting and the second being a machine policy that users couldn’t change in any way. The second registry setting is the same as what Group Policy is setting above.
For more granular control on disabling or enabling options in it, the registry entries live in:
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Feeds
From here, if you wanted to disabled ‘Open on Hover’ you’d use this value:
ShellFeedsTaskbarOpenOnHover : 0 (off) or 1 (on)
Intune
Intune is covered on the TechCommunity article and is just setting ‘Enable News and interests’ to ‘Allowed’ or ‘Not Allowed’
Microsoft also has an end user support article on News and Interests, which covers end user configuration, how they can turn it off, personalisation options and other user advice.