Twitter can be a great place to interact with friends, brands, celebrities, and just about anyone imaginable. The price of admission? Those people will probably tweet things you don’t want to hear about. Maybe it’s the new episodes of the TV show you’re still catching up on, maybe it’s a new social media trend or maybe it’s the news that Elon Musk is buying Twitter (although we have more about that dealif you are interested, incl things that can change).
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Movie and TV show spoilers are a frustrating but mostly harmless hazard. Reading tweets that include painful or potentially inflammatory content can have a negative impact on your mental well-being and it’s a bigger problem. An unfiltered Twitter feed leaves you vulnerable to both of these risks and many in between.
Fortunately, there is a way to protect yourself. Twitter offers the option to mute terms, the same way you would disable an account you don’t want to hear from.
According to Twitter’s description: “When you turn off words, you won’t get any new notifications about Tweets that include them or see Tweets with those words in your timeline.”
Here’s how to clear your timeline of unwanted threads.
How to disable specific words on Twitter
1. Tap your profile picture in the top left on a mobile device. Select More if you are using a computer.
2. Select Settings and Privacy
3. Select Privacy and security
4. go to Mute and block
5. touch Silent words. If you have any muted terms, they will appear in the next menu.
6. On iOS, tap Add button at the bottom right. On Android, tap + icon at the bottom right (top right in a web browser).
7. At the top of the screen, type the word or phrase you want to be quiet. If you want to mute multiple terms, which is generally more effective, you’ll need to mute them one at a time.
8. Choose your favorite details to mute the term: Whether you want to mute it on your entire timeline or just in notifications, whether you want to mute it from everyone or just people you don’t follow, and how long you want the term to stay on silence.
9. Hit Save at the top right of the screen to mute the word or phrase. If you want to add more terms, repeat again from step six.
Tips for closing Twitter terms
Although the silencing process is straightforward, in my experience, there is an art to successfully keeping unwanted conditions out of the timeline. I have learned two main tricks in my time trying to navigate around specific topics.
First, get a thesaurus. Like a long time James Bond Fan, I didn’t want to hear anything There is no time to die before I saw the movie. But I knew that the silence of the title would not be enough. I also deleted the terms “Bond”, “James Bond”, “007” and “Daniel Craig” to protect myself from as many spoiler avenues as possible. Similarly, if you need a break from pandemic talk, I’d recommend deleting words like “pandemic,” “COVID,” “COVID-19,” “vaccine,” “delta,” and “omicron “.
Also, choose the time frame that makes sense for you. Sometimes, you just want to avoid a topic for a day. Or maybe you just have to survive the spoilers over the weekend until you can watch a movie. But there may be times when it will be better to delete a term permanently. You can always modify your silent word settings and your sanity should come first.
For more tweeting tips, check out our Twitter Blue guide. We can also show you how delete your entire twitter history AND which privacy settings you should change.
