Twitter is in the middle of rolling out important new safety features that give you more control over what you see. Spam and abuse have been plagues for years now and it seems the social network is finally making a real attempt at thwarting them.
If you have these new features on your account already, you should find a new ability to mute specific types of notifications, words from your timeline, and even block accounts with the default egg avatars.
If you aren’t seeing these settings just yet, it may take up to a few weeks before Twitter enables them on your account.
How to Enable Advanced Filters on Twitter Notifications
Advanced filters let you for the first time hide notifications based on a specific type of account.
Tap the Notifications tab at the bottom of the Twitter app. Then tap the Settings icon at the top left.
Image credit: Twitter
Choose Advanced Filters.
Now you can sort through your options. You can hide all notifications from anyone you don’t follow to start. Plus, you can also hide notifications from anyone who has a default avatar. The default is the egg image spam accounts or annoying trolls often sport. It’s what you started out with when you first signed up for Twitter before adding your own profile picture.
Image credit: Twitter
Lastly, you can turn on muting people who haven’t confirmed their email or their phone, separately. These should also help reduce spam in your notifications so that only authentic users come through.
When you’re all set, tap Done and your Notifications panel should automatically adjust based on your new settings.
How to Mute Specific Keywords
Twitter already granted the ability to mute specific words from your notifications, but now it’s expanding the functionality. Once again tap the Settings icon in the Notifications panel. Choose Muted Words here.
Image credit: Twitter
Now you can add in your own word or hashtag you don’t want to see anywhere on the social network. For instance, if you don’t want to read about politics anymore, you can add in words “Trump” or “Clinton.”
Once you do that, tap the word to customize the restrictions. Twitter lets you mute from your home timeline as well as from notifications, plus choose whether it’s from anyone or just people you don’t follow.
Image credit: Twitter
This feature also lets you set timers on these mutes. You can choose to mute a word forever, for just 24 hours, seven days or 30 days. This is handy for trending topics that you suspect will dissipate after a while.
Tap save to apply your muted words. Timed ones will automatically un-mute after the specified duration.
