12 Facebook Settings and Notifications You Can Turn Off Immediately—Here's How

Some memories belong in the past. You can control whether you see any On This Day or other Memory posts—and you can even go as far as to list a specific person and date you do not want to be reminded of. In the left-hand sidebar of your profile page—in the same column that lists Friends, Groups, Messenger, and Marketplace—click on Memories (you can also go directly to facebook.com/memories). Choose Notifications in the left menu and select either "None" to turn off all notifications, or "Highlights" to only get notifications about certain memories, like celebration videos. 

You can also get down to the nitty gritty and decide if there are certain people or certain days you would rather not remember via Facebook notification. To block Memories related to certain people or dates, in the left-hand bar under Notifications, select Hide People (and then select individuals via search and drop-down option) or Hide Dates (and then set your preferred date parameters). You make the rules! 

Scrolling through your newsfeed, there are some videos you just do not want to see, but that play without warning anyway. To stop random videos from auto-playing in your Facebook News Feed, click the drop-down arrow button in the top right-hand corner, choose Settings and Privacy, then Setting again. Select Videos in the left sidebar (you may have to scroll down a bit), then click on the drop-down menu to the right of "Auto-Play Videos" and select "off."

On the Facebook app, you have the option to turn on Location History to allow Facebook to know your precise whereabouts through the Location Services on your device. But if you're not interested in having FB keep tabs and records of your various locations within the app, you can turn off Location History at any time. In the Facebook app, tap the Menu icon (three horizontal lines) in the bottom right corner; tap Settings, Privacy Shortcuts, and Manage your location settings, then switch the toggle icon off.

If you're either feeling targeted by your Facebook ads or simply don't want to be shown content you're not interested in, you're not alone. The next time an ad you'd prefer not to see pops up in your Feed or webpage guardrail, click the ellipsis on the right and select "Hide Ad" to delete that one advertisement, or "Hide all ads from [brand]" to free yourself completely (at least on Facebook).

It's not them, it's you—or, yeah, maybe it actually is them. Either way, you may have some extremely active Facebook friends whose posts are clogging your timeline (and driving you bananas). Don't want to go so far as to unfriend them, but need to quiet the noise? We hear you. You have a couple of options.

You can Unfollow them (different from Unfriending them or Blocking them)—basically their posts and activity will stop populating your feed, but you'll still be able to see their profiles and send messages. Do this by clicking the three dots in the upper right corner of an individual person or page's post, and select "Unfollow [person's name]." You can also head to the main top right drop-down menu, select Privacy and Settings, News Feed Preferences, Unfollow, and search for the person in question. 

Do you have a Facebook friend from high school that you haven't spoken to in years who keeps inviting you to play Candy Crush on Facebook? Not to worry, you can put a stop to that by blocking their app invites. All you have to do is go to "Settings," select "Blocking," and type the name(s) of your friend(s) who you don't want to receive invites from. This also works for events, apps in general, pages, and messages.