I’m not sure how, but I sure get a lot of event notifications and invitations on Facebook. I never want to join any of them, however, so it’s just noise. How can I block event invitations so they don’t clutter up my Facebook notifications?
Like many social media networks, Facebook seems to be predicated on the assumption that you’re “all in” unless you opt to change your settings or block people. Normally not a big deal, and who doesn’t want to be invited to an occasional birthday or anniversary party, or a concert from your favorite band? Some people, however, seem to have concluded that events are the prime way to reach out and connect with their followers on Facebook, so they send out invitations for weekly events like a podcast or live Zoom call. Sometimes they can even be invitations to non-events like “day one of our 30 day sale”, which are even more annoying!
By default, Facebook makes it pretty easy to invite your friends and followers to an event you host, but not so easy to stop the invitations if you’d rather not be overwhelmed. I envision Harry Potter getting all the invitation letters to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, somehow, but it’s actually a lot more annoying. The best solution is a gradual one, however, blocking the worst offenders (don’t worry, they aren’t notified you blocked them) and gradually cleaning up the chaos. There are some more aggressive tweaks you can make too, as desired. Let’s have a look!
FACEBOOK EVENT INVITES: BLOCK SENDER
I get invitations all the time on my own Facebook account, including from a local jazz club that I haven’t visited in a couple of years. I probably don’t need the invitations (and worse, they never list who’s playing, just that it’s another event). Here’s my notifications view:
You can see that I have both an invitation to an event (from Dazzle) and an invitation to “like” a Facebook page (from Thomas). Blocking the latter is almost impossible with the latest changes to Facebook privacy settings, but we’re focused on events anyway. Turns out that Dazzle can be blocked right from the Notifications window: Move the cursor onto the event and a “•••” button appears. Click on that and…
Choosing “Turn off new event notifications from this account” for your worst offenders is the easiest way to tame the chaos. If I choose this, I’ll never get another invitation from Dazzle. These are known as “Suggested Event Invitations”, however, so there’s also a way to stop them all at once. Note that Dazzle didn’t explicitly invite me to this event, this is a Facebook thing…
Once that option’s chosen you’ll see a confirmation window show up for just a few seconds:
But what if you want to stop all of these “suggested” invitations? That’s a bit more tricky…
DISABLE FACEBOOK SUGGESTED EVENT INVITATIONS
To stop the suggestions, you’ll need to go into Settings in Facebook, most easily done by clicking on your profile picture on the top right of a Web browser page, then choosing Settings & Privacy > Settings and choosing “Notifications” from the options. You’ll see a long, long list of notifications like this:
Scroll down until you see “Events” and click on it. That opens up and you’ll see the following:
These are worth tweaking, but the real payoff is when you scroll to the bottom of this set of options, because “Receive notifications for” has more than just one choice:
The bottom one, finally, is what you want to disable. Turn off “Suggestions” and you won’t get notifications for Facebook-generated invitations to events created by pages you’ve liked or followed at some point in the past. This should go a long way to helping!
BLOCKING FACEBOOK USERS FROM INVITING YOU
Before we wrap up, it’s worth noting that if you have a friend or colleague who is particularly annoying about inviting you to events or non-events, you can also block them so that whatever variant they try, you’ll be left blissfully un-notified. To do this, go back to the top of the Settings area and choose “Blocking” from the list of options. You’ll again get a remarkably long list of variants:
(Note the dashed line is where I’ve trimmed down the screen capture; “Block event invites” is pretty far down the list)
Search for “Block event invites” then click on “Edit” to proceed. A small pop-up appears:
You can easily click on “Add to blocked list” and then search for the page or person in question. Wondering what you’ve blocked in the past? Click on “See your blocked list“. Mine, sorry to report, is pretty long:
I’ve blurred things to protect the innocent, but… if they’re continuously inviting me to events that I don’t want to attend, are they so innocent? That’s a question I’ll leave for you to ponder, but this should give you lots of ideas about how to tame your own tsunami of Facebook event invitations. Good luck!
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