How To Stop Facebook's Video Ads From Automatically Playing

Facebook recently introduced the worst kind of ads to its users. If you sign in to the desktop or mobile version, a video trying to sell some kind of a service will immediately begin to play. The only way to stop it is to tap on it once.

Lifehacker's Whitson Gordon explains that you can completely disable the auto playing feature, but this hack only works on the desktop, not on your iPhone or Android device. iPhone and Androids can be set to play videos automatically only when connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Here's how it works for desktop:

Sign in to your Facebook account. Scroll over to the right and click Settings at the top.

Scroll over to the left and click "Videos" at the bottom.

Move your cursor over to the right and click "Off." The videos won't automatically play on desktop anymore. This process was done on Google Chrome, and it works the same in Firefox. For some reason, however, the "Videos" option doesn't appear in Safari, so Safari users might be out of luck for now.

Here's how you do it on your mobile device (it's the same for both Android and iPhone):

Go to Settings.

Scroll down until you see the Facebook option. Tap on it.

Go to "Settings" underneath the Facebook icon.

Turn on "Auto-Play on Wi-Fi only." The videos will only play when you are hooked into a Wi-Fi network.