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How To Turn off Twitter News Notifications

How To Turn off Twitter News Notifications

Twitter is a curious beast. One minute it’s an essential social network keeping you up to date with world events, friends, sports or whatever. The next it’s a vile pit of denigration and fake news. Managing this mercurial personality is not a lot of fun but is necessary if you want to keep using Twitter without being overwhelmed. With the news feature threatening to fill our feeds, how can you turn off news notifications? How can you tame Twitter to be better for you?

This tutorial will attempt to show you how.

Turn off Twitter News notifications

Twitter News is a relatively recent introduction that has been as much miss as it has been a hit. I began receiving news about baseball when I have never even hinted that I like it on Twitter or anywhere. Everyone knows football is the only game worth watching so why Twitter decided to waste my time with baseball is anybody’s guess. Nevertheless, it did so I turned off Twitter News.

I found it easier to turn off Twitter News on mobile rather than desktop.

  1. Open Twitter on your mobile device.
  2. Select your profile picture or the hamburger icon and then choose Settings and privacy.
  3. Select Notifications.
  4. 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 in Your Network, Topics and Moments because none of those features have been relevant to me. Your mileage may vary of course so leave or disable as you see fit.

Filter out the trash

Did you know you can filter out keywords so they don’t appear in your timeline? Neither did I until someone showed me when I was writing this tutorial. Here’s how to do it.

  1. Open Twitter on your phone.
  2. Select your profile picture or the hamburger icon and then choose Settings and privacy.
  3. Select Notifications.
  4. Select Muted words and select Add.
  5. Enter the words you want to filter out into the box.
  6. Save the settings and quit out of Settings.

This function is awesome. I have filtered out a lot of the noise from my timeline and Twitter is now a much better place to be. You can filter out hashtags and words from your notification and timeline. They will still appear when you search so you can still use Twitter as normal.

Stop location tracking within Twitter

Twitter can share your location when you’re active on the app. This is a big no no for me so it’s a good job it is easy to turn off. This time I found it easier to disable on the desktop app rather than the mobile app.

  1. Log into Twitter via your browser and go to Privacy and Safety.
  2. Uncheck the box next to Add location information to your Tweets.
  3. Check the other settings while you’re there.

You can customize most settings from here so if you have the time and the patience, you might want to work your way through. The page you see is only one of many pages you can select from the left menu. Check all of them for full control of Twitter. There are a ton of settings you need to check to be fully in control.

Stop with the bots

Some Twitter bots are useful, some are amusing but most are simply annoying. You can filter them out with a quick change to your notification settings if you’re seeing too much of them. It isn’t a setting to tackle bots directly but it is effective.

  1. Go to Settings and Notifications on Twitter.
  2. Mute Notifications from People who have a default profile photo, who haven’t confirmed their email, and who haven’t confirmed their phone number.
  3. Save your changes.

Most of the more annoying bots use the fastest method possible to get onto Twitter and won’t bother with a profile image, email or phone verification. By filtering those three, you also filter the worst of the bots. These settings do not include those you follow, so if you have a bot or bots you like, follow them and they won’t get filtered out.

Read Twitter unfollow suggestions

Earlier this year, Twitter began experimenting with unfollow suggestions. It developed an algorithm to identify low quality Twitter accounts and began offering suggestions on accounts 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.

It’s a trial right now as far as I can tell but if you see it, pay attention as it could further tidy up your timeline without any real effort on your part. Whether it becomes a full feature or not remains to be seen.

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Dec 15, 2020

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