Facebook Auto-play Videos

I will admit, I often spend to much of my spare time scrolling through facebook on my iOS devices. Starting today, I will spend less time in the facebook app. Not because of some sense of needing to cut down on my facebook time wasting, but because of a new “feature” facebook is deploying to some of it’s users, and apparently, I’m one of the lucky ones.

Facebook has started rolling out auto-play of videos in mobile news feeds. According to Josh Constine’s TechCrunch article, Facebook started rolling this out in September. I don’t typically pay close attention to Facebook news, except when they change privacy or security settings that adversely affect a typical user, so i was unaware of this change when I opened my Facebook app and discovered videos in my news feed were starting automatically.

The first few times the videos started, I thought I had tapped the video accidentaly, but when it happened and I deliberately stayed away from the video, I began to get upset. I spent about 10 minutes searching through the app trying to find a way to turn it off, but when that proved to be unfruitful, I took to the internet to find out what was happening. I did not have to search very long to find a page full of search results with articles about the change.

I found exactly what I was hoping to find in this TechCrunch article. I found a way to turn it off. I will let you know how to turn it off, but please read the article, it has more information on auto play videos.

If you have been picked for the auto-play video settings, you can click on the drop-down arrow at the top right of the post and select Disable Auto-play to disable auto playing all videos.