How to Bypass the Social Reader Apps in Facebook

Some stories appearing in your Facebook newsfeed, like the one shown in the screenshot above, require you to add a “social reader” application to your Facebook profile before you can access the underlying story.

This social-reading “feature” is enabled for quite a few popular sites including Yahoo, The Washington Post, Guardian, Huffington Post, Daily Motion, and many more.

The problem is that once you add the social reader application, Facebook may broadcast your activity on these sites to the newsfeed of your Facebook friends. Do you really want your friends to know what stories your have been reading or watching on the Internet? Facebook calls this “frictionless sharing” but it can be embarrassing sometimes.

How to Block Facebook Social Reading Apps

If you have added any of the Social Readers Apps to your Facebook Profile and would like to get rid of them permanently (so that they don’t broadcast stuff without your knowledge), follow these steps.

Go to Facebook Account Settings and open the Apps Settings page (direct link). This will show all the authorized Facebook apps that are associated with your profile. Search for “Social Reader” and hit [x] to remove that app from your profile. Alternatively, click the Edit button next to the app and set the visibility of “Posts on my behalf” to “Only Me.”

There are Chrome extensions that help you read articles on Facebook without adding the Social Reading apps but the downside is that extensions aren’t available for all browsers – especially when you are accessing Facebook on your iPad – and second, they may not support every site that’s enabled for social reading.