How to Hide “trending Topics” From Twitter and Facebook
Hot Topics is bullshit , says Select All. These little social media modules are swamps of platitudes and misinformation. A conspiracy theory video was posted on the popular YouTube page this Wednesday claiming that Stoneman Douglas High School students fighting for gun control are in fact paid actors. (Announcer’s voice: no.)
As Select All points out, these modules do not list the most popular topics; instead, they are driven by black box algorithms that account for the rate at which the discussion is growing, the source and god knows what else. However, they still give out unreliable information, and they are still factories for hashtag spam. Select All suggests getting rid of them completely. Here’s how to do it in your feed:
- On Facebook, the FB Purity Chrome extension will remove popular themes and a few other common annoyances. (You can re-enable everything else.) FB Purity is also available for Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Opera .
- On Twitter, the Hide Twitter Guff Chrome extension removes promoted tweets, ads, follower information, and Twitter trends. (You can turn the Who Subscribe feature back on.) This is also available for Firefox .
- On YouTube, we have not yet found a workable solution to completely hide popular videos. If you see popular videos on the homepage, try logging in and subscribing to multiple channels.
Together we can go out of fashion.