Lafayette, LA (KPEL News) – Facebook users hear tweets every time they scroll through their News Feed. We’ve gotten used to hearing the chirp when we lower the screen to refresh and see what our friends in Louisiana are doing.
Over the weekend, I was scrolling and almost every time I touched the screen, CHIRP! What is…?!? I closed the app and reopened it. TO BABBLE! Thinking my whole phone was freaking out, I turned it off and restarted it. TO BABBLE!
At the time, I took this as a sign that I shouldn’t be on social media. Honestly, I had more important things to attend to.
The next morning I logged in and the tweets continued. BORING!
Frustratingly, I continued to scroll, cursing the little bird that had become the bane of my Facebook existence, sure it was user error. Until I came across a post from someone in my social media community that offered instructions on how to stop it.
It worked!
Being the curious type, I had to find out why. Why on earth would Facebook, the company that makes billions by mindlessly scrolling and sharing more information about our personal lives than we should, think it was important to bore us while cashing in?
In short, to improve the Facebook experience.
According to Dataconomy, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, decided that we needed a more engaging and interesting experience and that adding a “subtle sound” would improve hearing.
Dataconomy writes:
These changes can also serve as eye-catchers, encouraging users to stay active and spend more time on the app. Overall, Facebook is constantly evolving to meet the changing preferences and expectations of its users, and introducing sounds is just one way to do that.
This might just be my opinion, but EPIC FAIL!
The majority of us have turned off all sounds on our portable devices. The phones don’t ring and the videos we see are cut off.
Whoever thought adding more sound, and more annoying sound at that, was a good idea.
The good news is that the platform offers a fix if you just want to stop it, and it’s pretty simple.
1- Open the app.
2- Tap the “hamburger” menu, the three horizontal lines located in the lower right corner of the screen. They may be in your profile picture and hard to see.
3- Scroll until you get to “Settings & Privacy”. Tap it.
4- Go to “Settings”.
5- Press “Media”.
6- Turn off this toggle switch next to “Sounds – In-App Sound”.
Go ahead and live tweet-free!
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