If you’re one of those people who refuses to look at social media out of fear of spoilers, Meta’s 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 haven’t yet watched, say, a certain episode of The Last of Us from learning a certain beloved main character’s 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 Reddit’s 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, it’s a great idea. However, it’s on the person posting to deploy the feature, which means it’s up to individuals to decide what they think is a spoiler and what’s not—as 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, there’s a greater question at work here: what are you doing on social media at all if spoilers are that important to you? Inevitably, someone’s gonna spill the beans—even if you’re carefully only treading on Threads—and you’ll only have yourself to blame for seeing whatever they wrote.
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