Removing Trending Articles From Your Facebook Timeline

Facebook does it again! First, it was adding ads to your timeline, next it was posting articles and updates based on what your friends were doing.

Now, Facebook is hijacking your timeline and inserting “Trending Articles”. While I’m not positive about the source, it’s likely that Facebook monitors the articles/blog posts that your friends are clicking on and sharing and then presumes that you’ll want to see them too.

Facebook inserts these trending articles to your timeline, presumably because your friends or family are sharing them.

Personally, I want Facebook to stay the heck out of my timeline.

So, in the spirit of reserving my timeline for my friends and family I did some testing and came up with a few steps that should remove these “Trending Articles” from my timeline. Give them a try and see if they work for you.

NOTE: Before you start, realize that the steps I’m detailing will block a series of apps and is a bit of a manual process.

I get that…but right now, I haven’t found a better way.

Also, each app that you block may impact other areas of functionality. For instance, if you use Spotify or Yahoo! News from within Facebook, blocking these apps to stop them from posting to your Trending Articles might also cause them to not work in other areas of Facebook. So…be cautious and evaluate whether you want to actually disable each app before you do it.

Ok…let’s get to it. To disable the apps that are posting to your Trending Articles, do this:

1) Log in to Facebook (yes…I actually typed that, but you’d be surprised how many people skip this step).

2) In the top right, drop down the triangle and choose Privacy Settings from the menu.

3) Next, scroll down and choose Blocked People and Apps

4) Type the name of the app that was posting to your timeline and you’ll see the app and any related apps. Just click it and it will be added to the list of apps that now are not allowed to interact with your Facebook account.

5) As you see apps post to your account, simply block them…which should cut down on the clutter in your Timeline.

I know it’s kind of a pain to have to manually block these apps, but Facebook it constantly trying to “bring your timeline to life”, meaning that they are going to continue to push apps to your timeline that they think are important to you.

For a list of all the Timeline Apps that Facebook has in it’s annoying toolbox, you can go here:

https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline/apps

In the meantime, keep fighting the good fight and don’t let Facebook butt into your conversations with friends and family.

Have a better way to do this? I’d love to hear it in a comment!

Cheers!

–Sean

Update: For those who are a little more tech savvy and don’t mind installing browser add-ons, there is an add-on/plugin that you can install called FB Purity that will “cleanse” your Facebook timeline. If you’re a little more daring…you can check out the details here:

http://www.tothepc.com/archives/hide-remove-trending-articles-facebook/