Facebook’s ‘keyword snooze’ hides phrases from your News Feed for 30 days | Tech News

Facebook announced today that it is now testing a Keyword Snooze button, which will allow users to hide TV spoilers, political discussions, or other unsatisfying posts from their News Feeds more effectively.

The feature varies slightly from the “mute keywords” on other social media sites, like Twitter. For starters, users can’t preemptively snooze a keyword from their timeline. They have to click on a post that has that keyword, and click on “snooze keywords in this post.” Facebook then provides suggestions of keywords within that post that users can snooze. Once they choose keywords to mute, the user won’t see any posts from a person, Page, or Group that contains those keywords for the next 30 days.

The biggest drawback of the feature for now is that users can only snooze a keyword for 30 days — no more, or no less. That might make someone hesitate to hit snooze if they just want to wait a weekend to avoid spoilers for a new movie. But a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat that “we’re looking to add different time options for people in the next few weeks as we develop the feature.”

The Keyword Snooze feature is the latest addition to what Facebook calls its suite of “News Feed Controls.” In December, the company introduced the ability for a person to snooze all posts from a person, Page, or Group for 30 days. The rollout of this and Keyword Snooze comes as Facebook executives continue to emphasize the goal of increasing “time well spent” on the platform.