Facebook Will Let Users Temporarily Mute Keywords On News Feed

Facebook seems to be adapting to modern social media standards by letting users willfully hide things they do not want to see. Similar to how Twitter lets people mute words they do not want on their timelines, Facebook is set to extend its “snooze” feature to keywords found in news feed posts.

The unreleased feature was spotted in the code of the Facebook app by Chris Messina, known to some as the inventor of the hashtag. The descriptive text that will presumably accompany the feature said users can mute any keywords they do not want to see from appearing in their news feeds or groups for 30 days. It should roll out to some users starting Wednesday.

Facebook confirmed the feature’s existence to TechCrunch in a Wednesday morning report. It is basically a more focused version of the snooze feature Facebook already has for pages, groups, and individual people. Sometimes people do not want to have a movie or sporting event spoiled for them, are just plain tired of seeing discussion about a certain topic.

Facebook’s implementation of muting is counterintuitive for most of those purposes because a keyword cannot be muted unless the user has already seen it in a post. In the feature’s current state, users have to use a drop-down menu on a post to choose which nouns in the post they want to mute for a month.

Thankfully, Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that a preemptive mute list should come in the near future. Twitter added official support for a mute list back in 2016.

The 30-day limit appears to be set in stone for now, though Facebook acknowledged that could change if users complain enough during the testing phase. Twitter, by comparison, lets users choose how long they want a word to remain muted, whether it is a week or for all time. Facebook’s implementation seems most suited for sports or pop culture spoiler avoidance at this point.

Facebook will officially announce the feature later on Wednesday, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.