How to Tell if Someone Muted you on Twitter [October 2020]

Depending on who you ask, Twitter is either a vibrant social network that allows for interpersonal connections, or a cesspool of negativity and ignorance.

Fortunately, Twitter includes features to help users customize their Twitter experience and ignore specific users that can make the site a pain to use.

One of the easiest and most effective ways you can take control of your Twitter feed is by utilizing the mute feature, which allows you to hide the tweets of someone online without outright blocking them.

But what if you’re on the receiving end of this? and Can you tell if someone has muted you on Twitter?

Read on to find out.

Has Someone Muted You on Twitter?

Muting a user removes their Tweets from your timeline, but it does not tell the other person what has happened. So the answer to the main question of ‘Can you tell if someone muted you on Twitter?’ is no — at least not through the app itself. 

This feature was added with privacy in mind — it wouldn’t be very helpful for avoiding drama if it tattled on you.

Although you used to be able to use TweetDeck—Twitter’s own account management app built for power users—to view which users had muted you, Twitter fixed this exploit in 2018, rendering the app virtually useless for anyone who wanted to see if their account had been muted.

That makes it difficult to truly tell if someone muted you on Twitter, but with a quick workaround, you can make a pretty good guess.

Social Engineering on Twitter

So, what are your other options for properly detecting whether someone has you muted? Here’s the deal: while this isn’t guaranteed to work, by using a bit of social deduction, we can quickly determine whether or not someone has you muted. Here’s how to do it.

Muting on Twitter doesn’t just turn off your tweets and retweets in their feed—it also disables notifications from your account on their device. Find a tweet on their profile that seems pretty basic in nature, then reply with something short and simple, but enough to garner a response in either a like or a reply.

Wait to see if you get a response, and if you do, there’s a good chance you aren’t muted. However, if your reply goes unnoticed, it’s likely the other use has muted your account.

How to Mute Someone on Twitter

Muting someone is very quick and easy to do.  You just need to open a Tweet and select the ‘Mute’ option. You can unmute someone just as easily, too.

Muting someone is not the same as unfollowing or blocking. You can still Direct Message a muted account and they can DM you. You just don’t see their Tweets in your timeline. It’s roughly the same as unfollowing someone on Facebook without unfriending them.

To mute someone from a tweet:

1. Open the Tweet and select the down arrow icon.
   
2. Select Mute.
   

To mute from a user profile:

1. Open the profile page of the person you want to mute.
   
2. Select the three-dot menu icon on the page.
   
3. Select Mute from the menu.
   

To unmute someone, you just need to visit their profile again and select the speaker icon to unmute them.

The Many Uses of Muting

Muting someone on Twitter isn’t just about quieting the over-sharers or giving yourself space from difficult relatives. Sure, that is its primary objective, but it is also useful if you manage social media accounts for work or as a profession. I used to do both of those and used the mute function often.

Muting Individuals

Muting individual Twitter users is handy both personally and professionally. Personally, you get to avoid their Tweets while remaining connected. This avoids some of that awkwardness that comes with blocking or unfriending someone who will probably want to know why or find some new and exciting way to harass you. Professionally, it means you can clean up a commercial Twitter feed, filter out the marketing, spam, bots, and trolls, and keep your timeline free and clear.

It also means you can maintain and grow your follower count without having to actually give much thought to their Tweets. While someone’s personal follower count is still seen as a metric for popularity, businesses and organizations have to keep it as high as possible to gain validity and recognition for the business or group they’re supporting. Muting keeps the numbers but cleans out the feed.

Muting Organizations

Whether you’re muting candidates and PACs during election season, or just trying to mute brands who spam you with too much information, muting organizations online is a great option to clear out some of the clutter in your feed. If you’re finding a lot of spam, muting the account that sent it really works.  You might find yourself taking a few moments to go on a muting spree.  Thankfully, the process is so simple, you can get a lot of spam muted in just a little time!

Do you know any way to tell if someone muted you on Twitter? Tell us below if you do!