How to Turn Off All Twitter Retweets
The Atlantic just presented a great argument for disabling retweets for everyone you follow on Twitter , but they don’t tell you how. So, we have created a tool for this.
Twitter allows you to turn off retweets from one user at a time, but not all at once. Turning them all off manually is a problem. So, our colleague Michael Herzberg wrote a script that automatically clicks “Disable retweets” for everyone you follow.
How
- Go to https://twitter.com/following and keep scrolling down until you’ve downloaded everyone you follow. (If you follow more than a thousand people, this will take a few minutes.)
- Open the developer console. In Chrome, it’s View> Developer> Developer Tools.
- In the command line at the bottom of the developer console, paste the following code and press Enter. (Again, this may take a few minutes, but you can let it run in the background.)
a=Array.prototype.slice.call(document.querySelectorAll("div.ProfileCard-content div.dropdown"));a.forEach(function(e) {e.querySelector("button").click(); e.querySelector("li.retweet-off-text button").click(); })
If this method doesn’t catch every user, try doing it on multiple screens at a time: load the Follow page, scroll down just a little, then run the code; scroll down one or two more pages, then run the code again; etc. Maybe I want to do a podcast while you’re doing this.
Every time you follow a new person, you still have to turn off retweets. Lol yes, sorry. On the other hand, you can still retweet.
To reverse the process, do all of the above, but replace off on in the code (inside the phrase "li.retweet-off-text button" ).
Why
As Alexis Madrigal writes in the Atlantic, retweets tend to spread clickbait and outrage. Turn them off and you will probably have a quieter meal. You will miss a lot of jokes and political news, but it might be worth it! This is definitely very different from the standard one.
Every time we write about hiding things on Twitter that you don’t like, someone comments on filter bubbles. Yes, if you’re using Twitter as a way to find alternative perspectives, just turn on the fire hose. But you shouldn’t be ashamed of limiting your Twitter feed to only the people you actually chose to follow. No one is required to read all tweets . You don’t even need to read the president’s tweets; just read any newspaper or blog.
And sad
Disabling retweets does not disable quoted tweets. Classic Twitter!
He also does not hide those tweets: “The three people you follow liked this stranger’s tweet,” or any other troubles on Twitter. And of course it doesn’t disable screenshots of tweets. For a really quiet broadcast, you just need to deactivate all known accounts that are being quoted too often on Twitter and unsubscribe from frequent tweets with quotes.
And if that’s not enough, try logging out .