How to disable the auto play of the videos on Facebook (also on smartphone)

Below are two simple methods to turn off (at least partially) the advertising videos on News Feed.

Facebook has officially announced last March the landing of the "Premium Video Ads" on the news feeds of users, both desktop and mobile:

Will last 15 seconds each, will be played automatically - but without sound - when the user scrolls with its news feed on them and will be stopped automatically when the video is exceeded. Clicking on a video advertising this will be expanded to full screen and plays, including audio.

Although it is a relatively non-invasive type of advertising (audio not active unless requested and immediate discontinuation of the video when it is put "out of focus"), the problem arises materially smartphones: playing a video could be wasting a certain amount of cellular data, which on the tariff plans in consumption is not a small thing.

Among other things, the automatic playback of the video in the news feed could considerably slow down the activity of the browser when it comes to navigating the desktop.

Below we will see how to disable the auto play video on Facebook from both desktop and mobile (take the example of Facebook for Android). In the first case the deactivation is complete, while in the second we're going to allow automatic playback only under the wireless network (it is not possible to totally disable the feature).

How to disable automatic playing of Facebook videos - Web Version (desktop)

Access to Facebook, then we click on the little arrow that gives down (the last icon in the upper right corner) and, from there, select Settings.

Select from the column to the left of the page, the voice Video, and then move the dropdown at "Auto Play Video" to "Off".

How to turn off (partially) automatic playback of video on Facebook - Mobile App

In this guide, we used the example on Android. The procedure should be similar on iOS and, at the time of writing, are not present on Windows Phone videos on the News Feed setting to disable or partially.

As I mentioned earlier, with this process we're going to turn off the auto play only undercover cellular network.

Open the Facebook app, we plug on user menu (or do swipe from left to right) and select "Settings." From there, we put the check mark on "Automatically Play Videos on WiFi only."

via