Clear the Clutter: Filter Out Politics, Boost Joy

A Facebook page flooded with political posts you’re not interested in can be desperately annoying—but there are ways to clean it up.

What if we told you that you don’t have to scroll through all those irrelevant political posts? By taking some simple steps, you can make Facebook fun and relevant again.

Here’s how you can block political and other annoying content on your Facebook account.

Facebook’s Timeline Can Get Swamped With Politics

Why does Facebook suck? There’s the usual bad behavior:vaguebooking , drama, and stalking. Then there’s politics. There’s always a political event that your irritatingly political friends use to flood your page with memes and posts that align with their particular politics. If your blood pressure rose just skimming that last sentence, you know what we’re talking about.

Here’s the problem: if you don’t have very strong views on these issues, all of these posts are incredibly annoying. If you do have strong views on these issues, at least half of these posts are still incredibly annoying. And the other half isn’t really telling you anything new.

Then to top it off, Facebook keeps suggesting trending posts on your page while you scroll, which gets dominated by politics and whatever the Kardashians are up to lately. There’s no way to turn these suggestions off. However, Facebook does let you tell it which stories you don’t want to see.

How to Filter Politics Out of Your Facebook Feed

If you find yourself regularly being sucked into long political Facebook arguments with friends-of-friends, you probably need to take control of your Facebook. Ditto if you’re constantly annoyed by celebrity news or friends who can’t function without constantly marinating in sympathy and attention.

We’ve talked about how to filter out annoying Facebook posts before, but there are some techniques that go further, and let you really tune Facebook to do exactly what you want.

1. Hide, Snooze, or Unfollow Pages, Groups, or People

Did you know that Facebook lets you block articles from specific pages, groups, and people? One good way to use this is to keep an eye out for articles that annoy you. That means clickbait, politics, the works.

Every time you see one, click on theThree Dots in the upper right-hand corner of the article and selectHide post . This action will make Facebook show you fewer posts of similar nature in the future.

You also have the option toSnooze that page, group, or person for 30 days. Most articles come from a small handful of sources. If you snooze every source that posts annoying articles, your feed will improve quickly.

Alternatively, if a source is completely unbearable, you can unfollow a page or person on Facebook entirely. This is particularly useful if you don’t want to unfriend a person but want to stop seeing their posts.

The only thing to keep an eye out for here is that some sources are a mixed bag, and have genuine value to offer, even if they are occasionally annoying. In those cases, you’re probably better off letting that source stay and using the more sophisticated strategy to get rid of these posts.

2. Remove Your Political Views From Your Profile

When you create your Facebook profile, it asks you about your political views, among other things. If you do add your views, however, Facebook uses this information to suggest political posts and ads to you. Adding this piece of information to your profile is not really necessary, unless you are affiliated with a political party, and you have to put your views on display.

The good news is you can remove this piece of information from your profile pretty easily. Log into your Facebook account and go to your profile. There will be an option to edit your profile just under your cover photo. Click onEdit Profile to proceed.

This will open an overlay window on top of your profile. Scroll to the bottom and click onEdit your about info . Now, underAbout , click onContact and basic info . Here, you’ll see yourPolitical views underBasic info .

To edit this information, click on thePen button next to it. Now, in the editable text section, delete whatever is written and pressSave . That’s it. Your profile has no information about your political views anymore and Facebook will not suggest those posts and ads anymore.

3. Use a Browser Extension

You can use a browser extension called FB Purity to fine-tune Facebook in entirely new ways. It lets you eliminate whole classes of posts you don’t want to see, like invitations to play social games or friends’ posts on other people’s walls. It’s entirely up to you. You can even get really fine-tuned, and block posts by specific keywords. We’re sure you can think of a few topics you never want to hear about again.

This is a really versatile plugin, and you can spend a long-time tweaking all the options. It even lets you rank posts in sequential order, instead of letting Facebook guess what you most want to see. This fixes another common complaint about the site.

FB Purity is basically an intelligent filter that lets you get rid of anything you don’t like. It’s also updated frequently to adapt to changes to Facebook’s UI and features. Our only complaint is that the graphic design clashes with Facebook a little, and its interface can be hard to navigate.

Creating a Facebook Feed You Enjoy

With these tools at your disposal, there’s very little reason to get annoyed at Facebook ever again. Facebook doesn’t have to be irritating—it can be a legitimate way to keep up with friends and talk about interesting things, without getting bogged down in toxic rants and attention-seeking behavior.