Twitter is a curious beast. One minute is an important social network that keeps you updated on world events, friends, sports or whatever. What follows is a pit of despicable slander and fake news. Managing this volatile personality isn’t much fun, but it’s necessary if you want to keep using Twitter without getting overwhelmed. How can you turn off news notifications with the news feature that threatens to fill our feeds? How can you tame Twitter to be better for you?
This tutorial will try to show you how.
Turn off Twitter News notifications
Twitter News is a relatively new promotion that is as missed as it is a hit. I started getting the baseball news without even hinting that I liked it on Twitter or anywhere. Everyone knows football is the only game worth watching, so anyone can guess why Twitter decided to spend my time with baseball. Still, it did so that I turned off Twitter News.
I found it easier to turn off Twitter News on mobile rather than desktop.
- Open Twitter on your mobile device.
- Select your profile picture or the hamburger icon and then select Settings & privacy.
- Select Notifications.
- Select Push Notifications and uncheck the box next to News.
Uncheck any others you don’t want while you’re there. Personally, I unchecked Popular on Your Network, Topics, and Moments because none of these features were relevant to me. Your mileage can of course vary, so leave or disable as you see fit.
Filter the garbage
Did you know you can filter keywords so they don’t show up on your timeline? Neither did I until someone pointed it out to me while I was writing this tutorial. Here’s how to do it.
- Open Twitter on your phone.
- Select your profile picture or the hamburger icon and then select Settings & privacy.
- Select Notifications.
- Select the muted words and select Add.
- Enter the words you want to filter into the box.
- Save the settings and exit Settings.
This function is great. I’ve filtered out most of the noise in my timeline and Twitter is a much better place now. You can filter hashtags and words from your notification and timeline. They’ll still appear when you search, so you can continue using Twitter as normal.
stop location tracking on twitter
Twitter can share your location when you are active in the app. That’s a big no for me, so it’s a good job that’s easy to close. This time I found it easier to disable it in the desktop app rather than the mobile app.
- Login to Twitter via your browser and go to Privacy and Security.
- Uncheck the box next to Add location information to your tweets.
- While there, check other settings.
You can customize most settings from here, so if you have the time and patience, you might want to move on. The page you see is just one of many that you can select from the left menu. Check them all out for full control of Twitter. There are a lot of settings you need to control to be in total control.
stop bots
Some Twitter bots are useful, some are fun, but most are just annoying. If you’re seeing too many, you can filter them out with a quick change to your notification settings. It’s not a setting to combat bots directly, but it’s effective.
- Go to Settings & Notifications on Twitter.
- Mute Notifications from People with a default profile photo who have not confirmed their email and phone number.
- Save your changes.
Most of the more annoying bots use the fastest possible method to get into Twitter and don’t bother with a profile picture, email or phone verification. By filtering out these three, you also filter out the worst bots. These settings don’t include what you follow, so if you have a bot or bots you like, follow them and they won’t be filtered out.
Read Twitter unfollow tips
Earlier this year, Twitter began experimenting with unfollow suggestions. It developed an algorithm to identify low-quality Twitter accounts and began offering recommendations for accounts that were not worth following. You may see messages like ‘You can improve your timeline by reviewing some accounts you may not need to follow’. And others like it.
As far as I can tell this is a test at the moment but if you see it watch out because it can tidy up your timeline further without any real effort on your part. Whether it will become a full feature remains to be seen.
