Twitter can be a great tool for finding out up to date information on some of the latest things happening in the world, but there are times when the constant barrage of tweets gets too much, or you simply don’t want to know anything about a certain subject. Luckily there are some great free browser add-ons that you can install that will allow you to filter out certain subject/word from appearing in your Twitter timeline.
For example, at the current time of writing there have been over 2 million mentions of Grand Theft Auto V in the past 24hrs according to the official Twitter Ads UK account, which means that people who have yet to play the game will get bombarded by spoilers appearing on their timelines.
Over the past 24 hours, there have been more than two million mentions of Grand Theft Auto V on Twitter. #GTAV #GTA5
— Twitter Ads UK (@TwitterAdsUK) September 17, 2013
The same is also happening for spoilers on the final season of Breaking Bad, which can be infuriating if you aren’t up to date. So let’s see how to add filters to Twitter so it will remove tweets that mention any spoilers on topics that you don’t wish to see or hear about.
Chrome
Download the Open Tweet Filter for Chrome and install it. Next, open up Twitter and head to the Filters section to start adding your filters. You have two options to choose from which are to exclude tweets containing certain words or exclude tweets from certain people. For this example we are going to add a load of words that we would like to have blocked in Twitter.
Separate your keywords using a comma, and then close the small filter window when finished. (the X at the top) Here’s an example of some key words:
BreakBad,Breaking Bad,GTAV,GTA V,Grand Theft Auto,GrandTheftAuto,GTA5,#BreakBad,#Breaking Bad,#GTAV,#GTA V,#Grand Theft Auto,#GrandTheftAuto,#GTA5,Grand Theft Auto V,#Grand Theft Auto V,Justin Bieber,
Let’s have a quick look at this in action:
Before Filter Added
After Filter Added
That’s it for Chrome.
Firefox
The Open Tweet Filter isn’t available for Firefox users, so instead you can use the Larry Filter add-on instead. Again, it’s very simple to use and works in the same way. Firstly, install the Larry Filter for Twitter add-on via the official Firefox store. Once it has been added, restart your browser.
Next head to your browser extensions area to access the options for the add-on, by either going Firefox>Add-ons or just hit CTRL+SHIFT+A
Next to the Larry Filter for Twitter extension select the Options button.
Now start adding the words you would like to filter out of your Twitter feed. Click Add after each word you input. You have a couple of options here on how you would like the filter to work, the default on is to reduce the opacity of the tweet to 75% (semi-hides it) and the other is to remove it from your feed. Choose the second option via the drop-down box and then hit Close the window.
That’s it. Hopefully you should have prevented any spoilers from appearing in your Twitter feeds.