Twitter is a world of free thought. Everyone can voice their own opinions, and they can do it really quick without thinking. It’s a great way to connect with others, have healthy discourse and meet new people. However, what is really great about it is you can control who you interact with, who sees your tweets and whose tweets you see. Unfortunately, twitter will sometimes allow tweets from people you don’t follow to show up on your timeline. Keep reading to see how to fix this to see only tweets from who you follow.
How to Stop Seeing Tweets From People You Don’t Follow on your Feed?
1. “Turn off Retweets” for those you follow.
This can be one of the most beneficiary things for people who are getting bombarded with tweets from people they don’t know, and quite frankly don’t care about, on their feed. For me, it doesn’t bother me every once in a while, but when someone retweets 20 things a day, and it shows up on my feed it gets annoying. Not only is it annoying though, but it also gets confusing: “did I follow them?” “who is this person?” You don’t have to do this for everyone you follow, but if you do it will significantly reduce the amount of unknown tweets on your timeline. It is really easy to do as well. All you have to do is go to the person’s profile (the one who is retweeting a lot) > click on the “settings” button, which is to the left of the notifications button (a bell), which is to the left of the “follow” button > then click on the first option on the pop up screen: “Turn off Retweets”. Then you’re all done and free from those alien tweets!
2. Mute those who have a lot of “favorites” or “likes.”
You may have noticed that your feed is full of tweets of people you don’t follow, that haven’t been retweeted, but instead favorited by someone you follow. This can get really annoying and frustrating. It looks like a regular tweet, except at the very top of the tweet – you see a heart ( <3 ) and then followed by “____ liked.” This means, it is showing up on your feed because someone you follow (the name in the blank above) favorited, or “liked” one of that profiles tweets. Why twitter decided to do this, I am not sure. Unfortunately, there is no way currently to turn this off, at least in the way you can turn off the retweets. However, there is an option if someone you follow is aggressively liking things that you don’t want to see. It most often works by simply muting the person. This works because you still follow them, and if they are protected, you can still see their tweets, but their liked tweets won’t show up on your timeline. This is really easy to accomplish as well. Simply, again, go to their twitter profile > click on the “settings” > click on “Mute @____”. After this is done, you will no longer see their favorites on your timeline. However, keep in mind, you also won’t see their tweets on your twitter timeline as well.
How to Remove Twitter Promoted Tweets and Ads on Your Timeline
Unfortunately, one of the most prevalent tweets that are most often considered annoying are Twitter’s Promoted Tweets or Ads. Promoted Tweets are ads themselves, as they are tweets paid by the company that get to show up on everyones twitter feed, or timeline. This could also be the type of tweets that are showing up on your twitter feed that are unwanted and unwarranted, but unfortunately there is no way to remove these tweets. On the bright side, though, these Promoted Tweets and ads are things that keep Twitter free! For me, I’d rather see a random promoted tweet from a profile I don’t follow every once in awhile, than pay for a twitter subscription. I also think it is, for the most part, interesting information that’s being tweeted. We see Ads on almost every site we visit, so it’s not like we can hate that much on Twitter for doing this. I also think it’s safe to say, we probably won’t ever see an option to turn off these ad’s or Promoted Tweets and keep them from showing up on our Twitter Feed. This is unless, Twitter decides to make a pay subscription option.
Accidental Follows
Another thing to be careful of is accidentally following people. Since now, Twitter puts suggested follows on your Twitter Timeline or feed, it is easy to accidentally follow someone unmeaningly. This could be another explanation why random tweets are showing up on your timeline. All you need to do about this is occasionally check who you follow. Make sure you know who it is your following as it is really easy now to follow someone accidentally. This is an easy fix and will help you control more what you see in your twitter timeline.