How to Block Tweets Containing Specific Keywords From Twitter Timeline

If you are following a large number of users on Twitter, you know how messy your timeline can get. There are a lot of users who tweet interesting things but sometimes, some of their tweets can be irrelevant to the topics of your interest.

Let’s take an example.

I do not have an iPhone or an iPad and thus I am not at all interested in any link or blog post which talks about those devices. A lot of my twitter friends tweet about the same, which is kind of a distraction to me. Suddenly, my timeline is flooded by tweets about iPhone and iPad and I would like to get rid of specific tweets without having to unfollow my friends, who tweet interesting links otherwise.

Here are two ways you can filter tweets containing specific keywords, without having to unfollow your trusted sources:

1. Use a Twitter Filter Bookmarklet

Declutter is a browser bookmarklet which can be used to remove tweets from your Twitter timeline. Just enter a blacklist of words or phrases which you want to ignore and drop the custom bookmarklet into your browser’s toolbar. When you want to clear your timeline with tweets that contain the selected words, just hit the bookmarklet.

You can always refresh the list and add or remove more keywords by editing the source of the bookmarklet. To do that right click the bookmarklet, choose “properties” and edit the location field (see screenshot).

The best thing about Declutter is that there is nothing to download or install and it can be used from any browser – Firefox, Chrome, IE etc.

Use Global Filters in Tweetdeck : Ignore Tweets containg keywords, people or from a Source

Tweetdeck is one of the rare twitter desktop clients which allow you to define a global filter of keywords, sources or people. Once you have added these filters, the tweets that match are never shown in any of the Tweetdeck columns (this includes lists, mentions or “All Friends” view).

To add filters in Tweetdeck, go to settings >Global Filter and mention the keywords, sources or people, as shown in the following image: