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06th Feb 2018

How to mute words on Twitter and avoid spoilers

SportsJOE

Recording live TV is only useful if you’re going to avoid everybody in the world until the time has come to sit down and catch up.

Avoiding everybody in the world is only useful if you can stay off your f**king phone.

There’s too much information out there now on too many platforms. Every media outlet, every man, woman and their dog want to give you the play by play update. Half time scores – hell, any score – are turned into memes and gifs and journalists the world over feel as though it is their calling to tweet every single shot and stat and race each other to be first on our timelines (which, ironically, probably means they’ll be missed because they’ll be bumped down faster with the rate of follow-up updates which are all exactly the same).

This is particularly strange when everyone in the country is already watching the same game so there’s really no need to rush to update us on a relatively insignificant moment which 100 other outlets will update us on – which we’ve seen with our own eyes anyway. Handy and necessary, sure, for times and games when the media has exclusive access or the spectators and the stream of information isn’t as large; pointless when the game is already being consumed by anyone who cares and every single other outlet is doing the same thing.

The point is (there was a point here somewhere)…

It is damn hard to avoid spoilers during live events.

TG4, for example, are showing deferred coverage of games but you might want to follow the narrative and opinion around what’s happening in the game being broadcast live.

You can’t mute every single account that might talk about the game and, sometimes, it’s just not as easy as staying off Twitter because people usually just open those apps out of habit.

We can, however, manage the situation. We can mute words.

Tuesday is Safer Internet Day and there’s a way for even sports fans to enjoy Twitter in a better, safer environment. You can even mute emojis.

Muting words, phrases, usernames, emojis, and hashtags overview:

  1. Muting is case-insensitive.
  2. You can include punctuation within a word or phrase when muting. Punctuation at the end of a word or phrase is not necessary. So, if you had the All-Ireland final recorded, you’d be wise to mute a word like O’Callaghan.
  3. Muting a word will mute both the word itself and its hashtag. For example:
  4. To mute Tweet notifications, Tweets in the Home timeline, or from replies to Tweets that mention a particular account, you must include the @ sign before the name. Doing this will mute Tweets notifications that mention that account, but won’t mute the account itself.
  5. Words, phrases, usernames, emojis, and hashtags up to the max character count can be muted.
  6. Muting is set to a default time period of Forever. Instructions on how to adjust the mute time period is listed below for supported devices.
  7. You can view a list of your muted words (and unmute them) in your settings.
  8. Recommendations delivered to you via email or through Twitter will not suggest content that includes your muted words and hashtags.

How to do it:

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