Facebook Just Added A Snooze Feature To Protect You From TV Spoilers — Here's How To Use It

Trying to avoid Bachelorette spoilers or the score to a World Cup Game? Sick of hearing bad takes on a certain trending topic or just don’t feel like seeing the name of a certain president in your newsfeed for a while? You’re in luck because learning how to use Facebook’s new “keyword snooze” feature will make all of those things significantly easier.

Announced on in a press release on Wednesday, Facebook is testing a News Feed feature that will allow you to hide or “snooze” posts that have a certain word of phrase. Similar to Twitter’s “mute words” feature, the “keyword snooze” feature being tested will let users block posts with their designated “snooze” words for 30 days. The “snooze” will apply to posts from any person, Group, or Page.

Once live, utilizing the keyword snooze feature will be pretty simple. You’ll just click on the top-right drown down menu (those three little gray dots) and select the “Snooze Keywords” options. Then, you’ll be able to designate the words or phrases you want to avoid. After that, posts which contain those words or phrases won’t appear in your feed for the next 30 days.

So, no more needing to quickly scroll through your feed anytime you haven’t caught up on a show, haven’t made it to the theater, or just don’t feel like seeing your relatives ask “What is BDE?”

Facebook currently has a “snooze” feature which allows you to hide posts from certain people, pages, or groups for 30 days. Thankfully, those people, pages, or groups won’t know that you’ve snoozed them. So, for example, if you’re high school class reunion is coming up and you don’t feel like seeing posts from old high school Facebook groups, that snooze feature might come in handy. And, in the future, if you don’t want to see a flurry of photos and posts about said high school class reunion, Facebook’s forthcoming “snooze keyword” feature will let you temporarily mute any posts that include the phrase, oh I don’t know, “OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S BEEN 10 YEARS!!!”

There are, however, a number of features this initial version of “keyword snooze” doesn’t include. The most important is that you cannot write your own keywords you like to snoozed. Facebook will auto-generate keywords based on the post you selected to snooze, as TechCrunch points out. In turn, that means you can’t proactively avoid spoilers. For example, you have to see a post about ‘Westworld,’ and then click on the post’s drop down menu. From there, you’ll see Facebook’s auto-generated keywords.

So, if the post reads, “What!!! I can’t believe what happened on Westworld! Maeve is such a badass!”, the Facebook will pull nouns from the text. For instance, it might give you the option to snooze “Westworld” and “Maeve.”

This first iteration of keyword snooze only words on text. So, you won’t be able to avoid spoilerific images unless the accompanying text falls in line with your snoozed keywords. Additionally, the auto-generated keywords don’t suggest any synonyms to also snooze. However, Facebook says they are looking into ways for users to customize those keywords.

Unfortunately, you can’t rig the system and snooze the keyword “sponsored” because the only posts the feature doesn’t work on is ads. So, even if you snooze ‘Oceans 8,’ you could potentially still see advertisements to buy tickets to see ‘Oceans 8’ in your news feed.

Double unfortunately, you can’t permanently snooze a keyword, like you can with Twitter’s “Mute” function. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, also allows you to permanently block words so you can filter comments. A Facebook spokesperson told TechCruch they may add that feature “if we’re hearing from people that they want more or less time.” While this may be beneficial if you forget you’ve snoozed words in relation to your favorite show, it does little to prevent abuse or harassment.

While the “keyword snooze” feature is a much-needed addition to the platform, it seems like Facebook still has some work to do before it’s fully effective.