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Facebook is testing a way to mute keywords

Facebook is testing a way to mute keywords

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Facebook snooze option
Image: Facebook

Today Facebook announced it is testing a snooze option, which will allow users to temporarily hide any posts from their timeline that contain keywords they’ve marked. The feature is being rolled out to a small group of users today and if it’s available for you, it will appear in the options within a post’s upper-right drop down menu.

The option to snooze all content from an individual for 30 days has been available since last December. This new method of snoozing stops you from seeing particular types of content for 30 days no matter who is posting it. If, for example, you still haven’t seen the Westworld finale and don’t want to have anything spoiled for you, you could set “Westworld” as a keyword to be muted for a month.

The caveat here is that there is no place on Facebook to manually input your chosen keywords. In order to set a keyword to snooze, you’ll have to find a post that contains the word in question, then select “Snooze keywords in this post,” from the post’s drop down menu. It’s a little self-defeating, and a Facebook spokesperson tells TechCrunch it’s considering other options for keyword snooze in the future, like a recurring list, or a pre-emptive snooze option in News Feed Preferences. Keyword snooze only works on posts that contain text, but ads are exempt.