The presidential debates are over, the election is less than two weeks away, and you've heard enough about the candidates on your Facebook and Twitter feeds. But your friends won't stop.
Instead of unfriending and unfollowing — which could cause rifts that outlast the next presidential term — you can install a free browser extension that will replace political posts and pictures on Facebook and Twitter with cats (or just about anything else you want). And best of all, the extension can be tweaked to cover any topic you yearn to see less of.
Unpolitic.me is the latest release from Buzzfeed's Chris Baker, the creator of Unbaby.me for people who are tired of friends' babies blowing up their news feeds.
To get started, download the free extension from the Chrome Web Store. Once it's installed, you'll see the Unpolitic.me icon appear in the upper right corner of your browsing window. From then on, political posts will be replaced with a blocked message, and instead of seeing Obama and Romney , you'll see cute cats.
The app does a pretty thorough job of blocking — even replacing the poster's profile picture in Twitter, so you won't be able to see who posted the tweet. (Facebook profile photos remain intact.) Each blocked post also contains an undo link that can be clicked to restore the original.
You can easily tweak Unpolitic.me to change not only what keywords trigger a block, but the replacement icons as well.
Click the Upolitic.me icon to open the window that shows close to 50 keywords that you can block or unblock. For instance, you may still want news on Iraq, so highlight and delete it from the list.
There are several options for replacement photos. You can change the default Instagram feed that pulls in photos tagged with "cat" to any tag. To see a preview, open Instagram and use the Explore button to see a sample of photos based on another tag. You can also add other photo feeds of your choice. If you choose to pull photos from multiple sources, the photos will be pooled and used in your Facebook and Twitter feeds as replacements.
