Facebook has decided to replace its "Hide All" button with "Unfollow," letting users block all messages and posts from selected friends. The new button gives users the option of blocking content from certain people without offending them, say through de-friending.

"This means you are still friends, but updates from that person won't appear in your News Feed. The goal of this change is to help people curate their newsfeed and see more of the content that they care about," Facebook said.

Facebook began rolling out the "Unfollow" button and a related change to its users on Monday. It added a "Following" button next to the usual "Like" button on a page or next to the "Friends" button on a personal timeline, which will also enable users to block posts.

Facebook also said Monday that it will start showing members more links to news articles when they visit the social-networking site, especially when they do so from their smartphones.

The social network will attempt to surface more of what it calls "high quality content," or links to newsy articles about current events, sports, or interests. Should a person click on a link to an article, he or she may also find three related articles tacked on to the origin News Feed post.

"We've noticed that people enjoy seeing articles on Facebook, and so we're now paying closer attention to what makes for high quality content, and how often articles are clicked on from News Feed on mobile," Facebook Engineering Manager Varun Kacholia and Software Engineer Minwen Ji wrote on the company's blog.