How to Remove Trending Articles on Facebook

A relatively new feature on Facebook is Trending Articles, which shows news stories that your friends and others are reading. Though some may find this feature useful, not everyone wants trending articles in their newsfeed. If you’re one of those people, read on and we’ll show you how to get rid of trending articles.

To remove trending articles on Facebook, mouse over the article and a small “x” will appear (see graphic at the bottom of this article). Clicking that “x” gives you three options:

• Hide Story – You can hide just this story, but further trending articles will continue to appear.
• Mark as Spam – This will remove the story from your newsfeed and tell Facebook not to show those types of stories in the future (though it isn’t clear to what extent this works).
• Hide all by (news source) – This is the best option as it’ll remove any future stories by that news source.

Hiding news sources is not the same as blocking an app. Even though Facebook refers to it as an “app” in their explanation of trending articles, I found that Yahoo! did not appear in my blocked apps list even after choosing to hide all by that source. For this reason, you’ll need to “Hide all by…” each time a different news source appears in your trending articles. Eventually that should slow this feature down to a trickle.