Facebook is a problem.. They happily show political adverts, heavily targeted and very under-regulated, as well as being slow to act against white nationalism and so on.The worst thing for me it was facebook turns us into. It privileges easy controversy, so your feed will be full of people getting angry at other groups but often not dealing with difficult issues in a reasonable and thoughtful way. If by some chance an interesting discussion does start up on facebook, it’s not properly shared or archived. There’s a lot to like, and there’s a lot of hidden facebook mechanics which we don’t know enough about to dislike. Anyway, I’ve recently moved towards participating on smaller, semi-private social groups off facebook and it’s much more enjoyable and productive.
Still, you might not be ready to leave it, wanting to keep in touch with friends and family, promote events and so on.. Using facebook’s own tools to step away can cause a lot of upset, as it will appear to your friends that you’ve blocked them.
A good alternative is to unfollow everyone and every page. If you’re like me that would normally involve 1000’s of clicks to remove all the weird and local pages and random people you’ve somehow friended over a decade or so. Here’s a way to do that automatically, although it takes a while (one unfollow per 2 seconds, to avoid facebook detecting and stopping your plan..), it is hands-off.
Here’s how, in e.g. firefox or chrome:
* Click the Arrow in upper right
* Select “News feed preferences”
* Click “Unfollow people and groups to hide their posts”
Now the tricky bit – to open the “javascript console”. This is what facebook doesn’t want you to do, as getting access to the javascript running in your facebook window is exactly what scammers want to do. (I’m not a scammer, but don’t take my word for it!)
This might be slightly different on your computer/browser version, but.. In firefox, It’s under the ‘burger’ menu in the top right (click the three horizontal lines), then “Web Developer” (that’s you!), and then “Web console” (not browser console). Under chrome, it’s a similar menu but three dots, then “more tools”, “developer tools”, then in the new frame that opens up select ‘console’ in the menu along the top.
At this point you should see a healthy warning telling you not to paste in code. If you decide to trust me and go ahead anyway, click the commandline area (it should have a ‘>’ or ‘>>’ in front) and paste in the following:
var unfollowButtons =document.querySelectorAll('div[aria-pressed="false"]'); unfollowed = 0;for(var i=0;i<unfollowButtons.length;i++) {setTimeout(function(element){ element.click(); unfollowed ++;console.log('Total unfollowed ' + unfollowed + ' out of ' +unfollowButtons.length) }, i*2000, unfollowButtons[i]) }
The browser might get you to do something like type “allow pasting” first, to make doubly sure that you aren’t being scammed. If you do type something like that, you’ll need to delete those words again otherwise it’ll be part of the code and nothing will work..
You should see the displayed people and pages get unfollowed before you, one by one. It won’t do all of them though, just a couple of dozen that have loaded in that page.. To unfollow everyone and everything, you have to scroll down in the ‘unfollow people’ box until they’re all loaded up. Then run the code again.
Then you’ll have a nice calm facebook experience and hopefully will enjoy some improved mental health.
