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You Can Hide Spoilers and More with Twitter’s Mute Feature

You can communicate with friends, brands, celebrities, and pretty much anybody else on Twitter. The cost of entry? It’s likely that those individuals will tweet about things you don’t want to hear. Perhaps it’s the news that Elon Musk is purchasing Twitter (though we have more on that deal, if you’re interested, including the things that might alter), a new social media trend, or fresh episodes of the TV show you’re still catching up on.

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CNET’s Brett Pearce
Spoilers for movies and TV shows are an irritating but often innocuous risk. Reading tweets that include upsetting or possibly upsetting content might be a greater issue and have a detrimental effect on your mental health. You run the risk of both of these things, as well as many more, if you have an unfiltered Twitter feed.

Thankfully, there is a method for self-defense. Just as you can mute an account you don’t want to hear from, you can also mute phrases on Twitter.

“When you mute words, you won’t get any new notifications for Tweets that include them or see Tweets with those words in your timeline,” reads the description on Twitter.

Here’s how to remove irrelevant topics from your timeline.

How to make some words silent on Twitter

1.On a mobile device, tap on your profile image in the upper left corner. If you’re on a computer, select More.

2. Choose Privacy and Settings.

3. Select safety and privacy

4. Select Block and Mute.

5. Tap the words that are muted. Any terms that are muted will show up on the following menu.

6. Click the Add button in the lower right corner on iOS. Press the plus icon in the lower right corner on an Android device (or the upper right corner on a web browser).

7. Type the word or phrase you wish to silence at the top of the screen. You must mute each term separately if you wish to mute several, which is usually more effective.

8. To mute the word, choose your preferred details: You can specify how long you want the word to be muted, whether you want to mute them from everyone or simply those you don’t follow, and if you want to mute them across your entire timeline or just notifications.

9. To mute the word or phrase, click Save in the upper right corner of the screen. Repeat step six if you would want to add more terms.

Advice on how to mute phrases on Twitter

In my experience, there is an art to effectively removing unpleasant terms from your timeline, even though the muting process is simple. In my experience attempting to avoid certain subjects, I’ve discovered two key strategies.

Get a thesaurus first. As a die-hard James Bond fan, I wanted to see the film before hearing anything about No Time to Die. However, I was aware that simply muting the headline would not enough. In order to protect myself from as many potential spoilers as possible, I also muted the terms “Bond,” “James Bond,” “007,” and “Daniel Craig.” Similarly, I would suggest muting terms like “pandemic,” “COVID,” “COVID-19,” “vaccine,” “delta,” and “omicron” if you need a break from talking about the pandemic.

Additionally, pick a timeline that makes sense to you. There are times when you just want to avoid a subject for a day. Or perhaps you simply have to endure movie spoilers for the duration of the weekend before you can enjoy a film. However, there may be situations in which it would be wiser to permanently mute a term. Your mental well-being should come first, and you may always change your muted word settings.

See our guide to Twitter Blue for additional tweeting advice. We can also teach you the privacy settings to adjust and how to remove your whole Twitter history.

See our guide to Twitter Blue for additional tweeting advice. We can also teach you the privacy settings to adjust and how to remove your whole Twitter history.

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