If youre one of those people who refuses to look at social media out of fear of spoilers, Metas Instagram-adjacent Threads app has a solution it hopes will keep you doomscrolling anyway. The new tool will let people mark words in their posts as spoilers, preventing eyeballs who havent yet watched, say, a certain episode of The Last of Us from learning a certain beloved main characters grisly fate.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the feature let users hide text or images that spoil a piece of entertainment (or anything that can be spoiled), simply by marking it as a spoiler. When a user marks it a spoiler, the text or image will be blurred until whoever is seeing the post selects it and asks to know more.
That sounds similar to Reddits feature that lets users hide potentially spoiler-y text when posting in forums discussing recent TV shows, for instance. So far, Threads is the only social media platform to offer such an option; X and BlueSky, THR points out, do not have anti-spoiler tools in place.
In theory, its a great idea. However, its on the person posting to deploy the feature, which means its up to individuals to decide what they think is a spoiler and whats notas well as what an acceptable window is for blabbing about a major plot twist. For some, it might be a week; others, it might be as soon as the thing happens in my time zone.
And really, theres a greater question at work here: what are you doing on social media at all if spoilers are that important to you? Inevitably, someones gonna spill the beanseven if youre carefully only treading on Threadsand youll only have yourself to blame for seeing whatever they wrote.
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