Threads Experiments With Spoiler Alerts in Messages
No matter how hard I try, I can’t stop scrolling through social media. For the most part, it’s not a big deal — other than raising my anxiety or stress , like any good doomscroll. But what’s worse than doomscrolling bad news? Spoilers, of course.
Movie and TV show spoilers are probably the main reason I’m thinking about ditching these apps for good. For some reason, my social media feeds think I’ve seen every popular piece of content that exists, and once it airs, I have to see every possible discussion and meme — spoilers be damned.
Fortunately, this digital lifestyle may soon change, at least on Threads. On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg made a short announcement on the social media site Meta. If you view a post from Zuckerberg’s Threads homepage, you’ll see “Spoiler alert:” followed by a gray bar (on desktop) or an animated blur effect (on mobile) covering the rest of the post. Click or tap that censored space, and you’ll see the rest: “We’re testing a way to hide spoilers in your Threads posts.”
The feature is currently in testing, so only a limited number of users will have access to it, but I welcome it. (Not that I use Threads that much.) As you can see in the images below ( via TechCrunch ), once the feature launches, you’ll be able to highlight a piece of text in a draft thread and select a new “Mark as spoiler” option that will appear in a pop-up window. Your selections will be hidden from others who find your post, unless they want to click through and see what you wrote.
Threads isn’t the first platform to offer this type of spoiler mask, of course. Other social media companies like Discord, Reddit, and Mastodon have offered ways for post authors to ignore spoilers for years. There’s no way to enforce this feature, but it’s just tactful: You never know who’s going to get your post, and if you care enough about a show or movie to post about it, you’ll probably appreciate the ability to give people the chance to watch that content for themselves before they’re spoiled.