Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Facebook’s new feature will make it easier to hide your posts from your boss

By

top tech stories facebook
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Facebook profiles may soon no longer be a long list of everything you’ve ever shared. Facebook appears to be testing a tool that would allow users to share posts without including them in their profile, sending them to the news feed only.

Facebook hasn’t yet confirmed the test of the feature, but The Next Web’s Matt Navarra recently spotted the option. The option shows up at the top of a new post next to the privacy options as well as the option to add to an album. By selecting “show on profile,” users can choose whether to, like the current option, post to both the news feed and the profile, or to just send the post to the news feed only.

Recommended Videos
Related

Another variation of the feature uses a pop-up window allowing users to choose to where to share, including the news feed and Stories.

If the tool makes it past testing, the option could give users more control over the look and content of their profile. Friends frequent the news feed to read updates, but visitors on the profile tend to be looking for something more specific, like something that user shared in the past, checking up on an old friend or checking out a potential new hire.

Users could, for example, want to share news stories they are interested in publicly, but may not want a potential new boss or friend to guess their political affiliation from the list of posts they’ve shared. Another option is to put the more important events in the profile, but leave off that photo of what was for lunch.

The test was spotted on Friday, December 15, the same day that Facebook brought the “snooze” tool out of testing. The option allows users to temporarily remove a friend, Page or group from their news feed for 30 days. A number of new tests and features appear to be cleaning up the social network while offering users more options to control what they see — Facebook also recently eliminated that real-time ticker and also adjusted algorithms to make video series that users visit more than once appear higher in the news feed.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Hillary K. Grigonis
Hillary K. Grigonis
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Hillary never planned on becoming a photographer—and then she was handed a camera at her first writing job and she's been…
TikTok’s new Stitch feature lets you quote other creators’ videos in your posts
digital trends live episode 418 tiktok phone in hand

TikTok’s messy state of affairs in the U.S. is not holding it back from releasing product updates. The short-form video app has rolled out a new editing tool called Stitch that lets you feature up to a 5-second-long clip from another creator’s video in your own post.

You can think of Stitch as a way to quote and reference other people’s work, similar to how you can quote tweets on Twitter. It allows users to pick and clip specific scenes from videos and add them to your own content. Stitch is a natural addition to TikTok and builds upon its existing set of collaborative features that have enabled its viral rise by making the platform more engaging.

Read more
Facebook News just expanded. Here’s how to customize your news tab
facebook news tab local launches

After launching tests to limited locations in the fall, Facebook’s dedicated news tab now houses local news for users in the U.S. Moving from testing to an official product this spring, Facebook introduced local news into the new tool. Facebook News houses journalism exclusively from a list of vetted sources while using algorithms to personalize the news that each user sees.

The Facebook News tab comes as social networks face increasing scrutiny for handling of fake news. Publishers on the new dedicated tab are selected based on “integrity signals” which Facebook developed with journalists to determine what publishers to include. The list is designed to eliminate publishers that share fake news and clickbait. The tab is partially determined by algorithms and part human curators, with journalists selecting the top stories listed in the first subsection of the new tab.

Read more
Facebook hires Reuters to fact-check posts, but politicians can still lie in ads
facebook-under-a-magnifying-glass

Facebook is trying to fight fake news and misinformation on its platform by hiring Reuters to fact-check, but it’s still not verifying political ads.  

The new fact-checking unit at Reuters, which launched on Wednesday, will look at the content posted on Facebook and Instagram and identify when it is fake or misleading. A Reuter’s spokesperson told Digital Trends that the types of posts would include photos, videos, and headlines. Ads are noticeably missing from that list of fact-checked content. 

Read more