Twitter announces a mute option to silence annoying users

Detailed on the official Twitter blog earlier today, the social network will be rolling out a new feature that allows users to eliminate another user’s tweets from their main feed. Calling the new feature “Mute,” this will allow Twitter users to remove all tweets and retweets from a specific user within their main timeline while still continuing to actively follow them on the social network. For example, many people might consider muting users that like to spam the feed with multiple posts within a few minutes. It could also be useful to remove user tweets that are mostly comprised of auto-tweeting activity from other services. 

According to the details, you will no longer receive push notifications from a muted user on your mobile devices. Interestingly, the silenced user will have no idea that they have been muted, beyond a noticing a drop in user activity within their own feed. In addition, muting a user isn’t the same as blocking a user. A muted user will still be able to retweet, favorite or reply to your tweets. However, you won’t see any form of notification from Twitter about that activity. That silenced user could be attempting to start a conversation with you, but you won’t realize they are talking to you since they are muted. 

Muted users can be un-muted easily at any time. To mute someone from their profile page, you simply click the gear icon and select the mute option. You can also mute users from the timeline on the Web or the iOS and Android platforms. To mute someone within the feed, you will need to tap the more option before clicking the mute option. At the moment, the mute feature isn’t available to all users. According to the post, Twitter plans to roll out the mute feature to all users over the next few weeks.

In the same way you can turn on device notifications so you never miss a Tweet from your favorite users, you can now mute users you’d like to hear from less. Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user. The muted user will still be able to fave, reply to, and retweet your Tweets; you just won’t see any of that activity in your timeline. The muted user will not know that you’ve muted them, and of course you can unmute at any time.
To mute a user from a Tweet on your iOS or Android device or on Twitter for web tap more and then mute @username. To mute someone from their profile page, tap the gear icon on the page and choose mute @username.
In the coming weeks, twitter will roll out the mute feature to everyone.