WASHINGTON: Search giant Google has been granted a patent for a system that would spot and hide spoilers about TV shows, books and movies from a user’s social media feeds until they are up to date.

Google was granted a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office earlier this week for a “system and method for processing content spoilers.”

The proposed filter would identify spoilers about TV shows, books and movies and remove them from a user’s social media feeds.

Users can already manually change their social media settings to block specific words and avoid spoilers. The new system, however, will not block every post about a certain show or book.

It will track all the episodes of a show that users have watched. It could then automatically censor content in a user’s feed if the post is about an episode the user has not seen.

However, this depends on users either manually logging or opting in to having their viewing tracked, similar to how Netflix currently tracks viewing and posts to connected social media accounts, ‘CNET’ reported.

The patent does not outline what social media accounts the system would filter or how Google would integrate the system with social networks it does not own.

“We hold patents on a variety of ideas — some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t,” a Google spokeswoman said.

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