A digital social space like Twitter can either be a place of curious and intriguing interactions or a bog of false information and negativity. Without a few useful privacy features to restrict information, using Twitter would have been much more difficult than it is. Users always have the option to unfollow or block topics and users, for instance, and sever their connection with those accounts.
There is also a slightly gentler approach that Twitter provides – the mute button. With it, you can remove an account’s tweets from your home timeline without the other person knowing. But what if the tables are turned and someone mutes you? The mute button won’t be much of a privacy feature if Twitter also let users know who actually muted them.
But there is a roundabout way of figuring out if someone has muted you on Twitter. Here’s all about it.
Muting on Twitter
Since there are no working apps or technical tricks that can help you find out who muted you, we are going to adopt a method of deduction. For that to make sense, it is important to go over how muting functions and what happens when someone gets muted on Twitter.
Firstly, the two accounts – of the muted and the one who mutes – can still follow each other. They can also send each other direct messages and the replies and mentions of the muted account will still appear in the notifications tab. All this is exactly as if the two accounts follow each other normally. But when someone mutes you, they do not get your tweets on their home timeline. They also don’t get any notifications. That is why they muted you in the first place.
Finding who muted you on Twitter
Now that we know what muting is all about, let’s take a look at how to find if you’ve been muted.
We know if you get muted by someone, none of your tweets will not appear on the timeline of the person who muted you, nor will they receive any notifications about it. So, one way to find out is to reply to a tweet of theirs, or tweet something about them enough to attract their attention.
Do this for every one of your followers suspected of muting you. If you get a response from them, chances are they haven’t muted you. But it is highly likely that you are if it goes unrecognized.
TweetDeck (Outdated)
Before, there was TwitterDeck, an account management app built for advanced users by Twitter itself. Through this app, users could check who had muted them with a few clicks. Unfortunately, this loophole was fixed in 2018 by Twitter as they made the app nonfunctional when it came to figuring out who had muted whom.
This now leaves us with the social deductive method alone. You could also simply ask the person if they’ve muted you. Of course, this is a cop-out answer that doesn’t help the case much. But it does happen sometimes that people temporary mute a few followers to avoid being notified of their activity for a while. It could be the case that they may simply have forgotten to unmute you later. In such cases, simply asking them about it could do the trick.
How to mute or unmute someone on Twitter
If you’d like to mute someone yourself, here’s how you can do so:
Open Twitter and find the account that you want to mute. Tap on the three-dot menu next to it.
Tap on Mute.
Another way is to tap on the three-dot menu next to one of their tweets.
And on Mute.
And just like that all their twitter activity will disappear from your home timeline.
To unmute, you will have to find the account or page yourself, go to the same three-dot menu next to the account, and this time tap on Unmute.
Or do it from the menu next to their tweets.
Muting someone takes no more than a few seconds. But there are no reminders to unmute someone after a period of time, so it’s easy to forget. If you think you’ve been muted, simply ask the suspected person if that’s the case. If you think they may hide it from you, try the social engineering method above and find out how likely that case may be.
