Facebook is clearly no longer the hot social media property it once was—younger generations are now far more likely to spend their time on TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram—but there are still billions of people logging into the Facebook site and mobile apps each month.
During its 20+ years of existence, Facebook has added a whole host of features and options on top of its platform, and branched out in multiple different areas. There’s plenty on offer in the modern-day Facebook that you may not know about.
Whether you’re using Facebook daily or you haven’t touched your account for months, these hacks and tips will help you get more from the app: Find out how to stop people from tagging you, how to clear your tracks on Facebook, how to look back on a friendship, and more.
Adjust the algorithm to limit AI slop in your Facebook feed
Let the Facebook algorithm know what you’re interested in.
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The Facebook algorithm isn’t always well tuned to your tastes and interests, and that might extend to AI slop as well as friends and family members you don’t particularly want to hear from. The solution is to give the algorithm a few nudges in the right direction.
Tap or click on the three dots in the top right corner of any post in your news feed, and you’ve got a few options: You can tell Facebook you’re not interested in something, mute posts from this source for 30 days, or permanently hide this person or page.
There are also options to tweak the algorithm in the other direction—select Interested if you want to see more of this type of content in your feeds.
Change your privacy settings to stop other people from finding you on Facebook
Facebook can cause you problems when it comes to people from your past reaching out, wanting to know how you’re getting on these days. While it can make for some serendipitous reconnections, there may well be old colleagues, friends, and relatives you’d rather not hear from every again.
You can control how available you are on Facebook by heading to the website and clicking your profile picture (top right). Choose Settings & privacy > Privacy Center > Common privacy settings > Profile information and then select your Facebook account. On the next screen, select How people can find and contact you.
There are a few settings you can tweak here: You can stop people finding you through your email address or phone number, and you can stop your Facebook profile from showing up in web search results. You can also decide whether message requests from people who you’re not connected to make it into your main inbox.
Choose who you want to see your Facebook posts
Your posts on Facebook can be visible to specific groups of people.
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Just like on Instagram or Snapchat, you can limit the audience for certain posts—though it’s not immediately obvious where the option is. When you’re composing a post, you need to tap on the Friends drop-down list just below your name (it might say something else, like Public, if you’ve already changed the audience for posts).
The menu you see next lets you limit the post to any group of Facebook friends you like: Whether it’s two people or 200 people. You can either specify the friends who can see the post, or the friends who can’t, and you can make new custom lists of contacts by going to your friends directory and choosing Create List.
See your entire Facebook friendship history with someone
There’s quite a cool way of looking back on the moments you’ve shared with a Facebook friend—at least on this particular social media platform, anyway. Head to the Facebook profile page of a contact, then click the three dots on the right and See friendship.
You then get shown photos, posts, and events you’ve both been involved in. Assuming you both use Facebook fairly often, it’s a nice trip down memory lane (you might also see some of this shared content in your feed when your friend has a birthday).
Undo your activity on Facebook
You can remove a reaction you’ve left on Facebook.
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If you’ve logged a comment or a like on Facebook that you later regret, you can take it back: On the web, click your profile picture (top right), then pick Settings & privacy > Activity log. This is a record of everything you’ve done on Facebook.
Choose Comments to get to your comments and likes, and to remove them if necessary. You can also delete posts you’ve made, and searches you’ve run on Facebook—it’s a central hub for viewing and managing your digital tracks on the social media app.
Download and save your Facebook photos
Facebook used to be the best place to post photos, and it may well be that you’ve got a ton of pictures on the platform that you haven’t saved anywhere else. Maybe you took them before photo backup from phones was so seamless—or perhaps they were snapped with an actual camera and scanned in (remember that?).
What do you think so far?
You don’t have to go through images and videos individually to get all this content exported from Facebook and put somewhere else (like Google Photos). On the web, click your profile picture (top right), then Settings & privacy > Settings > See more in Accounts Center > Your information and permissions.
Finally, you will see the Export your information option: This lets you get all of your data out of Facebook, including pictures, posts, and messages. Be sure to choose the Higher quality option for Media quality to get the best versions of your images and videos.
Stop people from tagging you on Facebook
Facebook lets you manually review posts you’re tagged in.
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You don’t necessarily want other people tagging you in pictures and other content (which means these posts will then be visible to your network too). You can enable manual tagging approval to stop this from happening: On the web, click your profile picture (top right), and select Settings & privacy > Settings > Profile and tagging.
When you’ve enabled tag reviews, you’ll get notifications on Facebook when someone else tags you. You then have the option to approve or block the tag (the tagger won’t be notified directly, but may notice if the tag hasn’t been accepted).
Control the type of ads you see on Facebook
Adverts are an inescapable part of the Facebook experience, but you can at least take some control over the types of ads you see, and from which companies. On the web, click your profile picture (top right), then choose Settings & privacy > Privacy Center > Common privacy settings, and Manage in Accounts Center under Ads preferences.
There’s lots you can do here: You can change the categories of adverts you see, hide ads from specific advertisers, and even access ads you might have saved—so if there’s a purchase you do want to make and didn’t get around to, you can do that here.
Keep your conversations on Facebook secret
Facebook Messenger chats can disappear automatically.
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Some of us will be using Facebook Messenger far more than the main site, and the messaging component of the platform can be tweaked and customized in multiple ways. For example, you can set messages to disappear after a set amount of time if you’d rather keep conversations off the record.
From inside a Facebook Messenger chat on mobile, tap the contact or group chat name at the top, then pick Disappearing messages. Note that the setting you choose will be applied to all messages from every sender, and a notification will be posted to the chat if you make a change.
You can give nicknames to your friends and family on Facebook
If you want to add some spice to a group chat, you can assign a nickname to the contacts in it: Tap on the group name at the top of the chat, then choose Nicknames. Bear in mind that everyone else will see the nicknames you set (and can change them to something else), and that you can use nicknames or real names when tagging people in the chat.
