If you remember the shock of learning Bruce Willis was a ghost, you probably lament the fact that you heard Bruce Willis was in Split before you saw the movie. Spoilers have always been a plague on entertainment, but the rise of the Internet has taken it to epidemic proportions. Facebook is today taking steps to help minimize our exposure to unwanted story details by introducing a new feature called Keyword Snooze.
The idea is that if wanted to go into the theater without any advanced knowledge of, say, Avengers: Infinity War or Deadpool 2 plot points, you could simply tell Facebook to stop showing you stories with those titles as keywords. Didn’t catch the latest episode of Game of Thrones? Snooze it. Missed who didn’t get a rose on The Bachelor? Snooze will keep the mystery for you.
Of course, you can also use Keyword Snooze to block any sort of irritating news feed clutter, whether you’re sick of hearing about Trump or your friend’s new baby. All you have to do is find a story with the keyword you’re looking to stop looking at, click the drop-down arrow, click “Snooze keywords in this post,” and then choose from a list of keywords which ones you’d like blocked. Posts from people, pages, or groups containing those keywords will be kept from your feed for 30 days, at which point you could re-Snooze them (via EW).
Keyword Snooze will be rolled out in test markets today, and will hit all users if it’s successful. Of course, there’s always the risk that users will use Keyword Snooze to keep their narrow viewpoints from widening by blocking important, true news stories. But frankly, that’s a risk I’m willing to take to never see another baby sleeping next to a dog.
