Studies have repeatedly shown that spending too much time on Facebook leads to a distorted view of other peoples’ lives and accomplishments compared to your own, which can lead to depression. Yet 1.1 billion people are currently logging on to the service every day, making it difficult to avoid. Thus, we have anxious, insecure people getting into arguments about whether their significant other is liking too many of that girl from work’s pictures and not enough of their own, a problem exacerbated by the constant stream of disgustingly happy-looking couples being beamed through said anxious, insecure person’s phone.
Enough of those kinds of arguments and a couple might break up, and once again Facebook is there to mediate this real life experience into a virtual one with the new breakup features it announced earlier this morning. Beginning today, the company is testing new tools for U.S. mobile users that will activate when said users let friends and data-miners alike know that they are no longer “Facebook official” with someone.
The first is the “See less of” feature, which removes the former flame’s posts from a person’s News Feed and removes them from suggested users to tag in photos. Then, the brokenhearted can freely post those Smiths lyrics without letting their ex know that they even care, like, at all with a feature that limits what posts former partners can see. (Unfriending them isn’t passive-aggressive enough, apparently.) Finally, once the rebound happens, users can easily untag themselves in old pictures with that asshole who had the audacity to not reply to their messages even though you know they saw them, because hello, Facebook has read notifications. Features to bring over bottles of wine and tell users they’re better off without that loser anyway are presumably still in beta.
[via The Hollywood Reporter]