It’s great to stay informed about what’s going on in the world, but it’s also very much possible to be over-informed. As the novel coronavirus wreaks havoc on the world, one of the easiest ways to control your level of information intake is Twitter mute filters. I needed them, so I thought you might too. Here’s how to cut down on coronavirus content on Twitter…
If you didn’t already know, Twitter has a very useful feature for controlling the content that comes across your feed. Found under Settings -> Content preferences -> Muted words (click here for a quick link to your settings on desktop), you can simply add terms related to coronavirus that you want to hide from your main feed. Twitter also gives you ample control over how this filtering works.
In my case, I’m choosing to hide all tweets with certain keywords from my home timeline and notifications, and I’ve chosen to hide them both from people I follow and do not follow. In my case, I’m choosing to mute all of the terms “Forever” — it’s fairly easy to turn off these filters whenever you’d like.
To create your own list, simply head to the aforementioned Muted words section on desktop or in the mobile app, and click the “+” icon to add a new term. You’ll need to add each term separately and configure settings for each one individually.
Here’s a quick list I put together of some terms that might help you get started:
- wuhan
- n95
- corona
- shelter in place
- new york
- covid-19
- virus
- china
- seattle
- san francisco
- distancing
- trump
- quarantine
- lockdown
- shelter
- crisis
- pandemic
- sars-cov-2
- infected
- fauci
- cdc
After you add all of these terms to your Muted words list, I recommend opening up your Twitter timeline and scrolling through it for a bit. Do you see any terms in content related to the coronavirus that you could add to the list? Go ahead and add them, and then refresh your timeline. Repeat this process until the list of terms you have muted is about double the list I provided above.
And that’s it — you’ve muted coronavirus on Twitter. If you can’t handle being constantly looped in on coronavirus-related news, one thing you can try is spending a small amount time every day getting all the latest important information by intentionally seeking it out. That way you can stay informed and make smart decisions for you and your family, while not overloading on things you don’t need to know all the details about. We could all use a little less doomsurfing.
New word for 2020. Every time my wife sees me staring ashen-faced at my phone, she tells me to “stop doomsurfing”.
— William Sutcliffe (@Will_Sutcliffe8) March 16, 2020
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