fb desires to help you steer clear of Updates About Your Ex post-Breakup

adore it or no longer, we reside our lives on facebook. even if we’re now not glued to the social network day in and time out, it can be the place most people chronicle lifestyles’s milestones: birthdays, new jobs, weddings, and new infants. (quite a bit and lots of babies.) but as everyone knows, life is not just about job promotions and newborns. quite a lot of unhealthy stuff happens too, and quite ceaselessly, that’s the place things start to get weird on facebook.

fortunately, facebook is privy to this and wants to make issues less awkward—at least on the subject of weathering the end of a relationship. nowadays, the company announced a new characteristic designed to help navigate a breakup and enable you to steer clear of your ex’s fb presence.

When a relationship ends—and is so declared within the “Relationship status” field—fb will robotically show choices that will let you filter out updates from an ex. the brand new instruments, which can be being tested on mobile within the U.S., will also make jointly tagged images and statuses invisible to others, and permit you to block sections of your profile from your ex.

in fact, you must all the time unfriend or block your ex (and you almost certainly should, if we’re being actual). no longer most effective does unfriending straight away delete the person from your information feed, nevertheless it additionally eliminates the temptation to cyberstalk them (which you’re going to do anyway, however at least this fashion there are fewer potentially soul-crushing important points to uncover). If the relationship is over in real life, for the love of god, end it on facebook, too. just tap the “unfriend” button, download Tinder, and start swiping.

however for these of us who still need to preserve that particular person in our digital lives without seeing consistent reminders of how a lot at an advantage they seem to be without us, this feature is a win. It also offers you bigger regulate over, say, images through which you might be each tagged that don’t merely disappear when you unfriend any individual.

This isn’t the first time fb has made adjustments to mirror life’s extra grim realities. In 2012, the company attracted some undesirable headlines when customers started noticing that some pals were “liking” giant companies on facebook, even though these pals had died. It was once just one instance of how, in its rush to connect everyone in the world and serve as a repository for our memories, pictures, and musings, fb hadn’t given much thought to what happens when an individual ceases to exist offline. (previous this 12 months, facebook eventually gave users the strategy to either mechanically delete their profile after they go away or designate a “legacy contact” who can handle their posthumous facebook presence.)

it can be arduous sufficient to care for breakups in real life. If nothing else, fb’s new breakup administration tool makes it just a tad more straightforward to maneuver the digital trail left in the wake of a failed relationship.