As the old saying goes, two things that you should never talk about in polite company are religion and politics. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the folks on my Facebook feed (and probably yours, too) have heard of that old saying, because my newsfeed has been completely inundated with political commentary since the start of the presidential campaign.
While I’m all for freedom of speech/expression/etc, having to scroll through faux political analysis that is sometimes untrue—and sometimes just downright hateful—gets to be a bit much to handle on a daily basis. It could be that some of my ‘friends’ need to be deleted, or maybe I just need a break from the constant barrage of red vs. blue without swearing off Facebook altogether until November 7th. Thankfully, technology comes to the rescue with a browser extension that could give me the relief I’ve been looking for.
Noppl, which stands for “No Politics Please”, is a browser extension that allows you to block unwanted content from your Facebook newsfeed. Developed by Kevin Faul and produced by Agile Consulting, the app is very simple to use and very effective. Links to install the extension on your browser of choice are on the noppl website. Once the extension is installed, you click the noppl icon in the browser bar or bookmarks tab and add any keywords you’d like to see blocked on Facebook. The added benefit of this tool is that it works for any keyword, so if you wanted to block something else, like cat videos, you could do that as well. Or maybe that’s just me…
I tested this out on the Google Chrome browser and it definitely works! When I added keywords like ‘Obama,’ ‘Romney,’ and ‘election’ to the tool I could scroll through pages of status updates in my newsfeed and never run across any mention of the presidential campaign. After I deleted all of the keywords from the tool, I started getting hit with political updates right at the top of the feed.
Overall, noppl is a great way to eliminate certain content from your Facebook feed without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. And what are you gonna use it for after November 6th? Well, there are always those cat videos…
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