Tutorial

How to turn off retweets for everyone

Thanks to this story people want to turn off retweets for everyone they follow on Twitter. You don’t need a script to do that.

Twitter only offers an option to turn off retweets for each account you follow. Turning them all off by hand is too much work.

The complicated solutions out there

Through the API

Install Ruby, create a Twitter app, run this script: https://gist.github.com/robinsloan/a045d26c513681f13680f319fbfc84d2

With a Javascript-Snippet

Scroll through all your followings and execute a javascript script in the browser console: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-all-retweets-on-twitter-1823550038

The easy solution to remove retweets from your timeline

Instead of turning off retweets for each account, you can mute retweets through the Twitter settings. It’s easy, it’s fast and if you don’t like it, you can reverse it with a single click. It doesn’t mess with existing settings (accounts you already turned retweets off). If you use the official apps it works across all of them. It can be done through the browser or an app. It removes native and original retweets

Step by step tutorial

  1. Go to your Twitter settings
  2. Choose “Muted words” (direct link)
  3. Click “Add”
  4. Add “RT @” as the phrase
  5. Uncheck “Notifications”
  6. Check “From Anyone” (see update at bottom)
  7. Click “Add” to save it
  8. Enjoy your calmer timeline

How to turn them on again

The best part. If you come to the conclusion that Twitter without retweets isn’t for you, you simply go to your muted words and remove the phrase again. The accounts you manually set to no retweets will still work like before.

Why does it work?

In the background Twitter treats native retweets like original retweets. If you access a native retweet through the API you will see that they full_text starts with “RT @username”. Because of that we can filter them through with this phrase.

Possible problems

There will be some false positives. If the muted phrase is anywhere in the text of the Tweet, the Tweet will be filtered.

Examples:

  • “Great art @Luca”
  • “I am part @Luca, part me.”
  • “Have you seen the containerport @Luca?”
  • “Let’s kickstart @Luca”

You get what I mean.

If you come to the conclusion that Twitter is actually better without retweets, you may want to use one of the other solutions.

Please let me know, if this helped you or if you have questions.

Update 2019-09-03

You need to select “From anyone” for this to work. Else the filter will not apply to the people you follow and those are the ones you want to be affected.

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