At the doctor’s chamber, you are scrolling through your social media feed, and a video begins to play. Then there are those moments when you want to conserve cellular data, which is going through the roof when videos autoplay. Here’s how to turn off autoplay.
Visit your profile picture icon, which appears in the bottom navigation bar of the mobile app. Scroll down to ‘Settings & Privacy’ and then to ‘Settings’. You will then find an option called ‘Preferences’, under which there is ‘Media’. Within that menu, there is an option to toggle video playback in your Feed and in Stories. Select the ‘Never’ option.
In the app, tap your profile picture in the bottom-right corner. Next, tap the menu icon in the upper-right corner of your screen; it appears as an icon with three horizontal lines. Navigate to the section titled ‘Your app and media’. Here, you can toggle on the option to ‘Use less cellular data’, but it’s not as useful as a ‘don’t autoplay content’ setting.
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Visit your profile picture in the top-left to access the sidebar. Select ‘Settings and privacy’, which is towards the end of the list in a smaller font size. Scroll down to ‘Accessibility, display, and languages’, which will lead to another menu with a ‘Data usage’ option, where you can turn off ‘Video autoplay’.
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The latest platform from Meta does not have a setting to turn off autoplay.