How To Turn On Twitter's Quality Filter

Welcome, my friends, to a new and glorious day: Twitter is now introducing a quality filter for all users. So for those of you who have complained that the social media site is mostly a never-ending tidal wave of harassment and crimes against grammar, fear no more! All you have to do is learn how turn your Twitter quality filter on — and lucky for you, doing so is easy.

Harassment, threats, trolling, and hate speech are rampant online, including but certainly not limited to Twitter. (Indeed, a recent study discovered that one in four comments in online comment sections for articles about rape or sexual assault use victim-blaming language.) It's one of the things that makes both social media services and the internet in general miserable for many users. In the past, Twitter has admitted that they've fallen short when it comes to dealing with harassment, so it's notable that they've recently been taking steps to fix it. Providing better options for reporting people who violate Twitter's terms of service, for example — which arrived on the platform in 2013 — is one such step.

But what if we could all just click a button and not see it anymore? What if the trolls didn't even have the satisfaction of knowing you saw their hateful messages? What if instead they were just shouting their mean-spirited, grammatically incorrect screeds into the void?

The quality filter, which prevents certain tweets from showing up in your notifications, has been available to verified Twitter accounts for some time. But now, anyone can use it to keep out unwanted messages. So how do you turn this lovely service on? It's easy. Here's how to do it both on the regular Twitter website and from within the mobile app.

On The Website:

To turn the quality filter on online, first click on your profile picture in the top right of your screen.

Then click Settings from the dropdown menu.

From Settings, you might think that you'd find the quality filter under Privacy, but you actually want to click on Notifications.

And then just click the quality filter check box to turn it on — if Twitter hasn't already automatically turned it on for you.

On Mobile:

On iOS, you can achieve the same effect by going to your profile and clicking the gear icon. From there, click Settings.

And then go to Notifications.

On Android, you can go to the Notifications tab, click the overflow icon, which consists of three dots, and access your settings from there.

Once it's on, the filter analyzes tweets based on criteria such as account origin and behavior, and automatically filters out duplicate tweets. In other words, someone you've just blocked can't create a brand new account and go right back to harassing you. And someone can't create an army of sock puppet accounts to send you the same messages over and over.

It won't fix all problems with the site — I'm still waiting for privacy settings that allow you to prevent people from seeing your tweets while logged out of Twitter, for instance — but it is a big step in the right direction.

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