COVID-19: Facebook Launches “Quiet Mode” To Stop Push Notifications

Paul Balo, April 14, 2020

Facebook has responded to the global COVID-19 pandemic in different ways including setting up an information centre to disseminate the right information regarding this. Just some days ago, they also announced “Quite Mode”.

In a blog post, the social media giant noted that it has become important to launch a feature in light of the stay at home order in many parts of the world that would enable people create a balance between the time they spend online and with their loved ones. To this end, once you activate this feature, push notifications from Facebook will be muted. You can do this by creating a schedule at different times in the day and may be turned on and off as many times as you please.

Facebook even took this feature further by saying that once you try to open the Facebook app while Quiet Mode is enabled, the app will display how much time is left before you can use the app. Of course, you can bypass this but the idea is to help users stay focused by encouraging them to focus on the tasks they have set for themselves.

Facebook’s head of health, Kang-Xing Jin said “We added Quiet Mode, which mutes most push notifications, and if you try to open Facebook while in Quiet Mode, you’ll be reminded that you set this time aside to limit your time in the app. We also added shortcuts to Notification Settings and News Feed Preferences, so you can make the most of your time on Facebook by controlling the type of posts you see in your News Feed as well as the updates you receive.”

Facebook back in 2018 launched “Time Spent” in-app to tell you how long you have spent in the app in order to help users manage their time between other tasks and Facebook and they were not alone in this. Apple launched its own “Screen Time” to tell you just how much you were engaged with your phone. But with the launch of Quiet Mode, Facebook added a more detailed usage statistics. Among them are usage over a two-week period as well as how you used the app in the day or at night times.