There may be times when you see content coming up in your feed that you are just not interested in and given the choice you’d prefer not to see! It could be that your timeline is suddenly full of tweets because there is a football cup final going on, it’s Eurovision time or because a new Wordle game gets popular and people like to share their daily results. We all have different interests and that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean you have to see these tweets! If this is happening to you then muting could be the answer!
You can choose to mute Tweets that contain specific words, phrases or hashtags. This is a good solution to remove the tweets twittering about a topic you have no interest in from your feed. Alternatively if it’s a particular person you are following you can opt to mute just their acount. Muting an account is an alternative to unfollowing an acccount or blocking someone. There are good reasons for making these choices, but should you then decide to refollow the account, then they will receive a notification, revealing you had unfollowed them. By muting, the account won’t get a notification. Muting can be done permanantly, until you choose to unmute, or for selected durations of 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days.
A further option is to mute notifications from a conversation you are tagged in. If you are being bombarded with notifications and you have moved on from the original start of the conversation, then it can be helpful to mute the thread.
So in short muting is a useful option to remove tweets from your timeline without unfollowing or blocking anyone. Below you will find how to do this for the different options available.
Mute words and hashtags
- Click More from the side navigation menu, then click Settings and privacy.
- Click the Privacy and safety tab, then click Mute and block.
- Click Muted words.
- Click the plus icon.
- Enter the word or hashtag you’d like to mute. Entries can only be added one a time.
- Select Home timeline if you wish to mute the word or phrase from your Home timeline.
- Select Notifications if you wish to mute the word or phrase from your Notifications.
- Specify From anyone or From people you don’t follow.
- Under Mute timing choose between Forever, 24 hours from now, 7 days from now, or 30 days from now.
- Click Save.
Note: Muting words and hashtags only applies to your notifications and Home timeline. You will still see these Tweets via search. Notifications for muted words and hashtags are applied to replies and mentions, including all interactions on those replies and mentions: likes, Retweets, additional replies, and Quote Tweet.
Mute accounts
Mute is a feature that allows you to remove an account’s Tweets from your timeline without unfollowing or blocking that account. Muted accounts will not know that you’ve muted them and you can unmute them at any time. To access a list of accounts you have muted, visit your muted accounts settings on twitter.com or your app settings on Twitter for iOS or Android.
To mute an account from a profile:
- Click on a username to open their profile.
- Click the more icon
next to the follow button. - Select Mute @account from the dropdown.
To mute an account from a Tweet:
Click the more iconfrom any Tweet.
- Select Mute @account from the dropdown menu.
Muting notifications for a conversation
If you would like to stop receiving notifications for a particular conversation, you can choose to mute it. When you mute a conversation, you won’t get any new notifications about that conversation. You will, however, still see Tweets from the conversation in your timeline and when you click into the original Tweet.
To mute a conversation via twitter.com, or from your Twitter for iOS or Android app:
- Go to the Tweet detail of any Tweet or a reply in the conversation you wish to mute.
- Click the more icon.
- Click Mute this conversation.
- Click to confirm.
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Sue Beckingham
Social Media for Learning 