Here’s a new tweak to how Facebook users can filter their News Feeds: The company says it’s rolling out a button that allows you to “unfollow” other users.
To be clear, it sounds like the functionality is pretty much identical to what users could already accomplish by hitting the “Hide All” button. For those of you who haven’t tried it, Hide All is a way to remain Facebook friends with someone while hiding their updates from your News Feed — say if they usually post content that you find annoying or boring, but you don’t want to offend them by completely severing your Facebook connection.
What is changing is the specific wording. Thanks to services like Twitter and Instagram, users have presumably become more familiar with the concept of unfollowing, and it seems that the language of following and unfollowing is becoming a bigger part of Facebook.
Next to the “Like” button in profiles, Facebook will also show users whether they’re following someone (this will show up on on individual user profiles and on company Pages). The mechanics of following, which allows you to follower a user’s public updates (assuming they’ve opted in) without becoming their friend, will remain the same, but this may encourage more users to take advantage of this option to influence the kind of updates that show up in their feed.
“The goal of this change is to help people curate their News Feed and see more of the content that they care about,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
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