Twitter for iOS May Soon Gain New Feature for Muting Words

A couple of years ago, Twitter introduced the ability to mute accounts in its iOS app. Since then, this feature has allowed users to remove specific accounts’ tweets from their timelines without unfollowing or blocking those accounts.

Now, it appears that the social networking company is nearing the introduction of a similar ability for muting specific keywords and hashtags.

Over the weekend, some users of Twitter for iOS noticed the feature, only to find that it had disappeared a short while later. According to The Next Web, which cites “a trusted source,” “the feature was enabled ahead of schedule accidentally, but it will likely be included in future iterations of the app.”

As seen in the screenshots taken by users quick enough to access it, the feature will add a new “Muted words” option in the settings menu of the Notifications section of the Twitter iOS app. Tapping this option will let the user add muted words or manage existing ones. Presumably, with the feature in place, it will keep tweets that contain the muted words from appearing on the user’s timeline.

Since it allows users to do away with tweets that contain words and hashtags that they don’t want to see (e.g. vulgarities and harassments) or have no interest in (e.g. Android or #Trump), muting keywords and hashtags has been a highly requested feature for the official iOS app of Twitter. It’s long been available in TweetDeck, the popular desktop Twitter client owned by Twitter itself, and has long been offered by third-party apps such as Tweetbot and Twitterrific. But it still has to make its way into Twitter for iOS. Here’s hoping that its accidental appearance is a suggestion of its imminent arrival.