One of the best Twitter features is the mute. You can pick any keyword, hashtag or person, and shut them up for as long as you like. This works in various Twitter apps, but if you’re using the official Twitter app, you can mute these keywords just by long-pressing them.
How to mute a Twitter keyword with a long press
Photo: Cult of Mac
Go ahead and open the Twitter app, and browse your timeline until something annoys you. It shouldn’t take long — it’s Twitter, after all. Then, tap to open the offending tweet in its own view — the Twitter app does something weird with the timeline view that prevents you from selecting words.
In the tweet view, just press and hold on the offending word, or on a @handle or #hashtag. You’ll see the familiar black pop-up text menu, only now it has an extra option: Mute. Tap that, and you’ll see the following options:
Photo: Cult of Mac
Here you can choose where the keyword will be muted: in your home timeline or in notifications, as well as who will be muted. That is, you can choose to mute mentions of a word only from people you don’t follow, or from everyone. You also can choose a duration for the mute filter: 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or forever. This is handy for muting mentions of a sporting event only for its duration.
Muting a person on Twitter
Photo: Cult of Mac
If you choose to mute a person instead of a keyword, you will see a different option. Mute a person, and you won’t see anything from them again, until you manually unmute them.
How about other apps?
Photo: Cult of Mac
Other Twitter apps don’t necessarily let you mute a keyword just by tapping it, but they do offer other, sometimes better, options. Tweetbot, for example, lets you mute a person for a time period. So, if someone you follow is a little drunk, and they keep live-tweeting a baseball game, you can shut them up for a day.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like these mute filters are shared between apps. If you like a tweet, it’ll show up as liked everywhere — on the web, and in any Twitter app you use. But as far as I can tell, mutes are confined to the app you make them in. The official Twitter app should sync up with the web version, though.
Twitter mutes are super-useful. I don’t mute people forever — that’s what unfollowing is for. But I mute all kinds of other nonsense on a fairly regular basis. If you don’t use Twitter muting already, you should check it out.
