3 September 2026 · 4 min read
How to block Facebook
Almost nobody opens Facebook to read the feed any more. They open it for an event, a group or Marketplace, and the feed is what they get first.
the short answer
- The reason people cannot leave is that Facebook holds infrastructure — the school group, the street group, the club — that has no other home.
- The feed is the tax you pay to reach that infrastructure, and it is charged on every visit.
- Blocking the app and using the browser is the version that works, because it separates the errand from the feed.
On iPhone, step by step
- Open Settings, then Screen Time.
- Tap App Limits, then Add Limit.
- Choose the app — or its whole category, which is usually the better choice, because a category covers the alternative you will open instead.
- Set the daily amount, tap Add.
- Turn on Block at End of Limit if you want the limit to be more than a suggestion, and set a Screen Time passcode that is not your unlock code.
And the evening window
- Settings, then Screen Time, then Downtime.
- Turn it on and set the hours — for most people the useful window is the last two hours of the evening, not the middle of the day.
- Under Always Allowed, remove everything you do not genuinely need during those hours. Phone calls and messages stay by default.
- Turn on Block at Downtime, or the schedule is a notification rather than a boundary.
What makes Facebook different
Facebook is four services in one icon, and only one of them is the problem. There is a feed almost nobody says they enjoy. There are Groups, which for a great many people are where a school year, a street, a hobby or a church actually organises. There is Marketplace, which has quietly become the largest second-hand market in most countries. And there are Events, which is still where a surprising number of things get arranged.
The three useful ones are what keep people installed, and the feed knows it. Every path to a group, an event or a listing goes through it, so a visit to check one thing is charged an unpredictable amount of scrolling on the way in and on the way out. The errand is real. The tax is the product.
Facebook's notifications compound this by being deliberately ambiguous: a notification that somebody posted in a group you are in looks identical to one that matters, and resolving it puts you back at the top of the feed. It is a system that converts your genuine social obligations into feed sessions, which is a considerably cleverer design than an infinite scroll.
Why the limit fails here
The limit fires and you dismiss it, because the thing you opened Facebook for was real — the event details, the message from the group, the item you were collecting. That is the specific pattern here: Facebook has enough legitimate use to generate a legitimate exception nearly every time the limit fires, and after the third dismissal the limit has taught you that dismissing is what you do. A time budget cannot distinguish between two minutes of Marketplace and forty of feed, and the two arrive through the same door.
What to do instead
- Delete the app and use the browser. The mobile site is worse in every way that matters, and the errands still work.
- Turn off all notifications except messages and event reminders. Group-activity notifications are the main feed-delivery mechanism.
- Unfollow — not unfriend — everyone whose posts you do not actually want. It empties the feed while leaving every group and connection intact.
- For Marketplace specifically, save the direct URL and go straight there rather than through the home page.
On Android
- Open Settings, then Digital Wellbeing & parental controls.
- Tap Dashboard, find the app, and tap the hourglass next to it.
- Set a daily timer. The app's icon greys out when the timer runs out and it stays that way until midnight.
- The timer can be removed in the same three taps, which is the whole difficulty with it.
- Bible Shield is iPhone and iPad only today — the blocking is built on Apple's Screen Time, and the Android build is not published yet. So everything on this page about Android is Google's own Digital Wellbeing rather than anything we make.
Unfollow everyone
The most underused control on Facebook is Unfollow, which keeps the connection and removes the posts. Done thoroughly it produces a nearly empty feed while leaving every group, event and message untouched.
It takes about twenty minutes once and it is the single highest-leverage thing on this page, because it removes the tax rather than the errand.
The browser is the answer here
For an app whose value is errands, moving to the mobile website is nearly costless. The errands work; the app's notification hooks and its smoothness do not follow you.
What you are actually protecting
The reason to be careful with Facebook rather than absolutist about it is that the groups are frequently real community — a street, a school year, a support group — and leaving them is a genuine social cost that people who advise deleting everything tend not to price in.
Keep the community, lose the feed. That distinction is available here in a way it is not on most of {these pages}.
What Scripture has to say about it
Ephesians 5:15–16
“Therefore watch carefully how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”
Redeeming is a commercial word — buying back something already pledged, at a price. That is a precise description of what it takes to get an hour out of an evening that has been designed to absorb it, and the passage assumes the buying back is deliberate and costs something rather than happening by good intentions.
Proverbs 27:20
“Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied; and a man's eyes are never satisfied.”
An observation about capacity rather than morality: there is no quantity of looking that produces the state of having looked enough. Three thousand years before an infinite feed, and the mechanism it identifies — that the appetite is not the sort of thing satisfaction applies to — is exactly the one being farmed.
Questions
How do I block Facebook on my iPhone?
Screen Time → App Limits → Social Networking with Block at End of Limit and a passcode. But for Facebook specifically, deleting the app and using the browser works better, because the errands survive and the feed's hooks do not.
How do I use Facebook groups without the feed?
Unfollow everyone — it keeps the connections and empties the feed — and use the browser rather than the app. Groups, Events and Marketplace all work fine there.
Should I delete my Facebook account?
For most people the account is worth keeping and the app is not. The account holds groups, events and Marketplace access that frequently have no alternative; the app is what charges you a feed session to reach them.
Other apps
- How to block InstagramThe Screen Time steps, why Instagram is really three apps in one, and what to do when you close it and open it again ninety seconds later.
- How to block X, formerly TwitterScreen Time steps, why the timeline refreshes under your thumb, and what to do about an app that makes you angry and calls it being informed.
Prayers
- A prayer for comparison and envyA prayer for the twenty minutes after somebody else's good news, four passages on envy, and why the feed makes an ancient problem worse.
- A prayer before you open your phoneTen seconds before the unlock: a prayer for the gap between wanting and opening, with four passages on attention and appetite.
Read next
- How to fast from social mediaA fast is not a deletion. Here is how to set the length, what to do with the hours it frees, and the four failure modes that end most of them early.
- Why your Screen Time limits stopped workingScreen Time limits fail for one structural reason: the button that removes them costs nothing. Here is what that costs you, and what actually holds.