As useful as Facebook is, the company never fails to discover new ways to be a royal pain in the behind. When it's not sapping your phone's battery life for no good reason, it starts auto-playing videos in your News Feed as you're scrolling through.
This might seem like a minor annoyance since you don't actually hear any audio until you tap on the video (thank Zuck for small mercies). But if you're on a limited data plan, auto-playing every video will do some serious damage if you frequently check Facebook on your commute or other places where you're away from Wi-Fi. Also, on phones with slower processors, it causes a dip in performance. But most of all, you should be able to choose which videos to play rather than have Facebook just play all of them without asking. You don't have to be a control freak to see the logic in that.
Thankfully, disabling videos from playing automatically while you're not on Wi-Fi is just a matter of tweaking some settings.
On iPhones and iPads:
If you're using the official Facebook app, navgiate to Settings > Facebook > Settings. This is your iOS settings, not the settings menu within the Facebook app. Toggle the "Auto-play on Wi-Fi only" switch to on. This won't stop auto-playing videos on Wi-Fi - and there's no way around that, sadly - but it will stop them from playing when you're using your cellular data connection to browse Facebook.
If you're using Paper, Facebook's brand new app (available only in the U.S. for now - I know, argh!), you can, thankfully, stop videos from starting up on their own no matter what connection you're on. Swipe down to reveal the Settings menu and toggle the "Autoplay Videos" option to off.
On Android devices:
In the official Facebook app, hit the hamburger button on the right — that's the button with the three horizontal lines, in case you didn't know. Scroll down till you reach "App Settings" and check "Auto-play videos on Wi-Fi only". Yep, they'll still play if you're on Wi-Fi. Fix this, Facebook!
On your computer:
Click the drop-down menu in the top-right of the Facebook website and browse to "Settings". See that little "Videos" link all the way at the bottom in the left pane? Click it, then change the drop-down menu for "Auto-Play Videos" to off. This only applies when you use Facebook on the computer, as the website graciously tells you.
Voila. No more auto-playing videos. Leave that stuff to Vine, Facebook.
