I do not want to see your friends's naked flesh, thanks.

March 27, 2012 4:41 AM

Is there any way, from my end, to stop photos of people I don't know from showing up in my Facebook feed when friends like or comment on them?

When friends of mine like or comment on a photo or link by someone who is not my Facebook friend, it shows up in my feed. This is annoying in that it clutters my feed, but this morning's naked photo of a man I've never heard of was really the last straw. I can't find any information on stopping this from my end. Is there any way to do it?

posted by not that girl to computers & internet (12 answers total)

Naked Guy and the owners of the other photos that show up on your feed have their privacy settings to Public, or Friends of friends, that is why they keep appearing in your feed.

You can click on the right of your friend's name to get the drop down unsubscribe options menu. Click on unsubscribe from comments and likes, and you won't see anything they like or comment on. Doesn't solve your problem entirely, but should stop pictures of randoms appearing in your feed.
posted by Ziggy500 at 4:49 AM on March 27, 2012

This is annoying, and I don't have a real solution, but I am thinking of putting out a public service announcement to all my friends saying that if something has the "world" icon below it, it's public and any interaction they have with it will be *broadcast* to all their friends.

Examples of things I've found out/witnessed this way: the fact that my brother was recently dumped by his girlfriend; a bad-tempered argument between a friend and her boyfriend, conducted on a third party's public posting; a complete stranger's pregnancy announcement; the fact that an acquaintance's periods returned in month 23 following the birth of her son.

There's been a circular announcement going around containing something similar to Ziggy500's suggestion, but it really doesn't solve the problem and will mean you don't see some things that you do want to see. The problem will be solved either when people stop commenting on public postings, or when Facebook stop the automatic broadcasting of this stuff.
posted by altolinguistic at 4:57 AM on March 27, 2012

You can click on the right of your friend's name to get the drop down unsubscribe options menu. Click on unsubscribe from comments and likes, and you won't see anything they like or comment on

I wish this was true, but it doesn't seem to be. Facebook really, really wants me to see that stuff, to the extent that they'll show it to me even after I say no.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:59 AM on March 27, 2012

What I've found does help is choosing "Most Updates" or "Only Important" from the "How many updates?" part of the Friend "Settings" list. For whatever reason, it seems to filter out likes and comments pretty effectively (though you will still see them in the Live Feed thingy on the right). However, what it deems "important" is then up to Facebook. I have found it pretty good for getting rid of cruft, though. YMMV.
posted by fraula at 5:21 AM on March 27, 2012

The only thing I've been able to do is to unsubscribe from a specific friend's comments and likes -- all of their comments and likes, not just of people I don't know. If you hover on the top right of the post, you'll see a little down arrow, click on that and unsubscribe from comments and likes. (I think you can also go to a friend's page and click on Friends->Settings, but Facebook pages are so inconsistent, I'm not sure this option appears on everyone's page).

I haven't been able to find a way to automatically unsubscribe from everyone's comments and likes.
posted by bluefly at 5:23 AM on March 27, 2012

You can use FB Purity to filter out things you don't want to see. One of the things you can block is "Tagged in, likes or commented on photo"
posted by Lucinda at 5:27 AM on March 27, 2012 [5 favorites]

Been there. Like others have said, I couldn't find a way to change the settings. I tinkered, Googled, etc. But I've tried a couple other things. First, in my case the mutual friend who caused the NSFW photo to pop-up in my News Feed was somebody close enough to me that I felt comfortable talking to him about it (professionalism, boundaries, etc.). Second, I posted a status update letting my friends know that Facebook was broadcasting these things. A lot of people weren't aware. And third, if the problem had kept recurring with a particular person (it hasn't), I would have filtered that person from my News Feed altogether.
posted by cribcage at 6:48 AM on March 27, 2012

You can click on the right of your friend's name to get the drop down unsubscribe options menu. Click on unsubscribe from comments and likes, and you won't see anything they like or comment on

I wish this was true, but it doesn't seem to be. Facebook really, really wants me to see that stuff, to the extent that they'll show it to me even after I say no.

I had to keep at it for like two solid weeks, but eventually this seems to have calmed my feed down. It was an annoying two weeks, for sure. I rarely see things just because a friend commented on them anymore. By far this is the most annoying feature that Facebook has implemented without giving users a universal setting to turn it off.
posted by misskaz at 7:12 AM on March 27, 2012

Theoretically, the way to turn this off is to "unsubscribe" from your friends' "comments and likes." You have to do this individually for EACH friend.

In practice, the "unsubscribing" does not work reliably, and you might as well be playing wack-a-mole with a piece of tissue paper.

I use FB less and less.
posted by fingersandtoes at 8:15 AM on March 27, 2012 [1 favorite]

You have to do this individually for EACH friend.

I haven't gotten around to it yet, but apparently if you make an "everyone" group you can then set your preferences for the whole group, instead of one-by-one.
posted by JoanArkham at 8:52 AM on March 27, 2012 [2 favorites]

Seconding recommendation of FB Purity (add-on for Chrome, Firefox, or greasemonkey script). Send the developer a few bucks if you like it. It's made my FB experience immeasurably less irritating.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 10:40 AM on March 27, 2012

For what it's worth, I doubt anything will ever change on the FB side for this, since it's in their interests to preserve an ability to force things onto your wall. We're already seeing the reset window for "Sort > Recent Items" (or whatever it's called) shrink to less-than-a-night's-sleep, which is one of the things that tells me that seeing things the way I want to see them is low on FB's list of priorities. Furthermore, witness Google+'s pervasively irrelevant "Hot on Google+" posts in one's G+ stream to see where the social network experience is leading.
posted by rhizome at 10:50 AM on March 27, 2012