Maybe more than like any other social network, Twitter goes beyond family and friends to connect you with a global audience—it’s not unlike a town square where the whole world can gather. You may find yourself reconnecting with places you’ve never heard of or receiving direct messages from people on the other side of the planet.
This is how Twitter is configured to work by default, and there are many advantages to this openness. However, if you prefer to have a more limited, private experience on Twitter, the platform offers many tools to limit who can find you, who can see your tweets, and who can contact you.
We’ll show you how to find these options through Twitter’s web interface, although you can find the same settings through Twitter’s mobile apps.
Public or protected
Your Twitter account as a whole can be either public or protected (private). If it’s public, anyone can see your profile and your tweets, even if they don’t have a Twitter account. Other Twitter users can freely follow you, reply to your tweets, and retweet them.
Choose a protected Twitter experience, and only your followers can see your tweets—and those followers must be specifically approved by you. You can read more about public and protected tweets here.
To change the setting for your account, open Twitter on the web and click the three dots in the left navigation bar, then Settings and Privacy, your account, Account informationAND Protected Tweets.
Open or Close your DMs
Direct messages (DMs) are how people contact you directly on Twitter. These work regardless of whether your account is protected and by default anyone who follows you can DM you.
This also means that anyone you’re following can message you. To allow any Twitter user to message you, go to the web settings page and then click Privacy and security AND Direct messages and check Allow message requests from everyone box. You can read more about this setting here.
Even with this option enabled, you must still accept the message request from anyone you’re not following in order to reply. You can see your messages and your message requests here on the web.
Be harder to find
There are many ways to find people on Twitter. By default, anyone who has your email address or mobile number on their phone can see you as a contact suggestion when they load the Twitter app.
To prevent this from happening and make yourself harder to find, head straight settings page for Twitter on the web, then select Privacy and security AND Discovery and contacts. Uncheck the labeled boxes Let people who have your email address find you on Twitter AND Let people who have your phone number find you on Twitter.
