A person who is a die-hard fan of Game of Thrones hears that the
first episode of the season is out and it might be a few hours before he
can watch it. So, probably he would lock himself in a room, throw away
the key and cut every communication through social media and WhatsApp
and all that just to save himself from the spoilers. Not just Game of
Thrones, spoilers can ruin almost any movie and TV show for you that you
have been waiting for months. “Did you hear about Jon Snow’s ****?” | Shutterstock
Most of these spoilers are from popular social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter.
Some of your friends consider it their birth right to spoil the movies
just for fun but they really don’t understand that how important it can
be for an individual who has waited for quite a few months just to enjoy
the show like everyone else.
So today, I will share with you a few tricks that you can use to
fight such spoilers on Facebook and Twitter and make sure you enjoy the
show or a movie without any spoilers.
Blocking Spoilers on Facebook
We will be using a tool called F.B. Purity
which is a browser extension available for most of the modern day
browsers. The extension works out of the box to fight irrelevant content
on your Facebook timeline and hides them to show only the ones which
matter to you. Most of these contents that F.B. Purity hides from newsfeed are game requests, application spam, ads and sponsored stories.
When you install the extension and load Facebook, you will see the
F.B. Purity link under the Status Update box which will tell the number
of updates that the extension has hidden from you. If you click on the
F.B. Purity link, it will open up the F.B. Purity Options.
Under the Newsfeed Filters section, you will see a
lot of options to filter the news feeds that you get on your FB
timeline. Under the option where you see Text Filter, enter the
words or phrases (on separate lines) that you wish to filter from your
news feed. For example, for Game of Thrones, it should be GoT, Game of
Thrones, Jon Snow and whatever you think might be used by your friends
in their status updates.
That’s all, once you are done, you can click on Save and Close to save the settings. You are now safe from spoilers as far as browsing Facebook on your browser is concerned.
Blocking Spoilers on Twitter
There are extensions like Open Tweet Filter and Larry filter for Twitter
available for Chrome and Firefox respectively using which you can block
tweets containing specific keywords while you are browsing the official
website. You just need to install these extensions and enter the
keywords, hashtags and even the users you wish to block on your Twitter
timeline.
It’s as simple as that. These extensions will protect you to a great
extent when it comes to spoilers and other useless updates you get on
your Facebook and Twitter timeline.
What About Smartphones?
For Facebook, there is no app or settings that I am aware of that can
block keyword based updates on the official app. You can anyways
uninstall the app and do your phone a favor with huge battery drain and unnecessary background app activity.
For Twitter, there are various third-party apps available for
Windows, Android, and iOS using which you can blacklist certain keywords
on your timeline. We have already covered some of the top tools with
this feature in one of our previous articles and you can have a look at.
Conclusion
So that was how you can protect yourself from spoilers on Facebook
and Twitter. If you would like to share any additional tips for our
readers that can help in fighting spoilers, please reach out to us
through comments or our forum.
Especially if it’s about filtering updates on Facebook for smartphones, I would love to hear.
