And it’s not just the ads. It’s the spam, the prompts for games and quizzes, videos popping out all over the place, and all the other distracting random stuff designed to steal my precious hours on this earth. One of the best things that I did to improve my Facebook experience was to install a browser extension called FB Purity. I honestly think that without this I would have dumped Facebook a long time ago. Must read: Facebook is the AOL of 2021 FB Purity is a browser extension that, as the makers put it, “helps you to take control of your Facebook experience.” Who doesn’t need some of that in their life? There’s so much built into FB Purity that it’s hard to know where to start, so I’ll just cover the features that I find useful. There’s a text filter system that lets you filter out specific keywords/phrases. This is great for making things like political posts and anti-vax/5G conspiracy tinfoil hat garbage evaporate. There’s also a powerful image content filter that lets you filter out images of cats, dogs, selfies, babies, memes, food, and smoking. It also allows you to create custom image content filters. With a few clicks you can hide all of the following: Events, Games and App Requests, Recommended Pages, Suggested Groups, People You May Know / Find More Friends, Get Connected, Pokes, Friend Requests, Birthdays, Chat, Trending Topics / Trending Hashtags, Businesses For You, Stories, Watchlist. I no longer get invites to play games, which is just super.
Breaking up Facebook? Try data literacy, social engineering, personal knowledge graphs, and developer advocacy
FB Purity will also tell you on your list has deleted, unfriended or blocked you. This can reveal some interesting trends, but on the whole I’m not that bothered by what other people choose to do. FB Purity is only available for desktop browsers – Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome (and any Chromium-based browser), Edge, Safari, Opera, Brave and Maxthon – and runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS (so unfortunately there’s no version for iOS/Android). FB Purity is donationware, so if you like it, you can donate to keep the project moving forward. I’ve had FB Purity installed on my desktops and laptops for several years. The browser extension is solid and reliable, and is updated regularly. There are a few unsupported features currently because of the new Facebook look, but on the whole it does an excellent job.
