Facebook Releases Snooze Button To Mute Your Obnoxious Friends And Family

Facebook is one of those places where sometimes we feel bad for unfriending people, even if their posts annoy us. Maybe your friend isn’t always annoying, maybe they just had a baby and you are totally not in baby mode or perhaps its election season and political views are just too much. Facebook has announced some changes and the most important of them is probably the new "Snooze" button.

With Snooze you can give yourself a break from your friend for up to 30 days at a time. Facebook's Shruthi Muraleedharan writes, "One of our core News Feed values is giving people more control. Today, we’re launching Snooze, which will give you the option to temporarily unfollow a person, Page or group for 30 days. By selecting Snooze in the top-right drop-down menu of a post, you won’t see content from those people, Pages or groups in your News Feed for that time period."

Facebook is also making changes to address the quality of your news feed. Things like clickbait headlines and false news are being demoted. Facebook writes, "We’ve made several changes to News Feed to provide more opportunities for meaningful interactions and reduce passive consumption of low-quality content — even if it decreases some of our engagement metrics in the short term. We demote things like clickbait headlines and false news, even though people often click on those links at a high rate."

Facebook also has a new feature called "Take a Break", which allows people more control over when they see an ex-partners posts on their feed and to control what their ex can see. This control also expands to past posts as well. Facebook is also looking to address some of the criticism levied against it by ex-executives that allege social media is bad for humanity.

The social giant has pledged a million dollars towards research to understand relationship between media technology and youth development and well-being. Facebook says it doesn't have all the answers, but it hopes the research it is helping to fund will help find the answers.

Facebook wrote, "We’re also making investments to better understand digital distraction and the factors that can pull people away from important face-to-face interactions. Is multitasking hurting our personal relationships? How about our ability to focus? Next year we’ll host a summit with academics and other industry leaders to tackle these issues together."