On Facebook, adding your relationship status has been there for a while now and that simple inclusion has led to breakups in real life when there is a change. There have been studies that have been carried out there and are available on the web that show how Facebook is involved in breakups and in some serious cases, marriages being annulled in the process.
The company has noticed this and has decided to release tools that will help people interact with their exes. When a couple decides to change their relationship status to indicate they are no longer in a relationship, they will be prompted with these new tools.
There is the usual option to change the relationship status but the new thing is that if you change it to “Take a Break”, the tool will prompt you to let you see less of the person. Enabling “Seeing less” of your former partner will lead their posts not showing up in your Newsfeed and their names not showing up when tagging or composing a new message. The privacy of past posts can be edited where you can decide to keep them as they are or comb through them so as to decide which you would like to keep them private.
It might have taken Facebook a while to come up with these tools but this will help people who have broken up to sort out their social media visibility so that the situation does not appear messy online.
Unfortunately, Facebook iterated that these tools are available on mobile in the US and will roll it out more extensively based on the feedback they will get.
