Facebook is testing the ability to snooze keywords so that you don’t see them for 30 days in News Feed and Groups.
Tired of people spoiling the ends of series or movies, or getting fed up with people discussing a specific political event or situations? Facebook is testing a feature that will help you keep your peace of mind – one that will give you the option to “snooze” specific keywords for 30 days. The feature is currently rolling out to a small group of users, but Facebook is likely to roll it out more widely.
The new feature was spotted by another code sleuth Chris Messina who found a string for “snooze keywords for 30 days” within Facebook’s code. At the moment, users can only snooze other users, Pages, and Groups, but this new feature goes a step further, bringing keywords into the mix.
To snooze a keyword, users first have to find a post that that includes it. Not ideal if you’re about to get a spoiler in the very post you need to look at to snooze the keyword. However, Facebook has said that it is also working on a “preemptive snooze option” as well, which may help with situations like this. Also, we hear that a “recurring snooze list” is on the way as well.
For the time being, as soon as you see the word you want to snooze, just go to the drop-down arrow and click/tap on the “snooze keywords in this post” option. A list of nouns from the post appears, and you can add them to your snooze list. The feature obviously only works on text and needs an exact match of a word, not synonyms.
Snoozing works for organic content and you won’t be blocking ads that might mention a word. But I wouldn’t be too worried about that. Other platforms like Twitter or Instagram have keyword blocking features and have had them for ages; perhaps Facebook is starting to see sense in the idea. I, for one, will welcome it. Especially permanent muting.
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