Ah yes, as we wind down the pre-election political mayhem on Facebook, I know exactly what you're talking about. Even posts that have nothing to do with politics are being hijacked by people who are admirably passionate about their political views, even if they're a bit blind to the fact that others might want to talk about ski slopes or SAT scores without the national debt and our military strategy being brought into the fray.

Once you are involved in one of those discussions, even if it's after an innocuous "like" or comment tied to the original subject of the post, you're right that subsequent comments and activity ends up in your Notifications menu, an update every few seconds. Even when you really just don't care.

Fortunately, Facebook does have an "unfollow" link, but you have to pay attention because it's not where you'd think it should be -- a rather typical comment related to the Facebook user interface, of course, but we'll just keep moving forward, right?

I'll demonstrate. Here's a recent snapshot of my notifications menu with the latest updates shown:

Notice the top update, that Andrea Lowe Cockrum, Denise Haskins and Michael Galuska have all also commented on Jim Cockrum's link.

But Jim's original link started out rather political and certainly ended up a hotbed of inflamed rhetoric, far beyond what I wanted to read about.

To unfollow it, I click through to the post itself:

Logically, you'd expect the unfollow link to be tied to the "X" butt on the top right, but that's not where it is. In fact, if you click on that, you can mark his discussion as spam, but it's not. I might not want to follow it, but it's definitely not spammy!

Instead, between the post and the first comment is a line of additional links that offer more control over your interaction, and that's where you'll find the unfollow link:

Click on "Unfollow Post" and that's it, you're done. You won't see any more notification updates from this particular discussion, and, as far as I can tell, you can unfollow as many discussions as you'd like.

How do you know it worked? Because the link'll change:

Obviously if you change your mind and decide you want to follow the discussion again, you can click on "Follow Post" and it's back in your notification list.

All in all, pretty easy once you know where to look for the link.

Oh, and you can find AskDaveTaylor on Facebook too. Find us, like us: Ask Dave Taylor on Facebook.