How to Mute Everyone

Simon Hill

Once upon a time, a terrible take on social media might have sucked me into an argument. Nowadays, it simply speeds my curmudgeonly decline. My attempt to break out of the echo chamber was a short-lived experiment that almost killed my faith in humanity. Despite the negative impact of doomscrolling, I remain hopelessly addicted to my phone but reluctant to delete my social media accounts. Thankfully, there is another way.

Free yourself from manufactured outrage and the fear of missing out. Life is too short to subject yourself to the ravings of every misguided relative, drunk friend, or semi-acquaintance. It's time you learned how to mute. While we're about it, you may also want to consider how to control who sees your posts and how to tidy up your social media accounts.

When you mute someone on social media, you stop seeing things they post in your feed. Mute a chat and you stop getting notifications about new messages. You can still look at their profile to see what they're posting or open a group chat to catch up on messages you missed. The beauty of muting is that the people you mute do not know you muted them.

Learning to mute people and groups is the best way to avoid the potential conflict of unfriending, blocking, or leaving a group chat. It may be healthier and more honest to cull your friend list, but the reality is that unfriending and blocking can have real-world consequences. People get offended. They may want to know why you blocked them. If you don't fancy dealing with that, muting is the way to go.

While Meta is rethinking the Facebook feed, cutting all the posts you would rather not see still requires some input. There are a couple of ways to mute on Facebook.

You can also mute and ignore people or group chats on Facebook Messenger. Here's how:

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Another option is to restrict people, which means you won't get notifications about messages or calls and cannot message or call them. Existing chats will be removed from your main Chats list, but they can still be found under Message requests or by searching for the person. Restricted contacts can't see when you're online, see any new posts, or tell whether you have read their messages, and vice versa.

Perhaps you believe retweets ruined Twitter, or Musk's Twitter takeover has wrecked your feed. If you plan on sticking around, consider limiting who can contact you, and start muting people you no longer want to hear from.

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Parker Hall

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Muting people does not stop them from being able to send you direct messages, but you can snooze conversations so you won't get notifications every time a new message comes in. Here's how:

Things are a little different on TikTok. You can tweak settings to limit who sees your videos, but you can't mute people you follow. If you continually skip their videos quickly, the algorithm should learn that you don't want to see them. You can also filter comments, mentions, and direct messages.

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Parker Hall

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Julian Chokkattu

Thankfully, if you have a troublesome commenter on TikTok Live, you can mute them.

You can also unfollow people, and TikTok won't notify them, but they can see that you no longer follow them by looking at their Follower page.

It's worth noting that you can also remove followers, so they can no longer see any of your content. They won't be explicitly notified, but they may notice if they look at their Following page.

While Instagram has a Quiet Mode, all it does is pause notifications. If you want to stop that steady stream of inspirational quotes, nonsensical memes, or plates of food, you should mute your way to a better feed. Here's how:

Reece Rogers

Parker Hall

Brenda Stolyar

Julian Chokkattu

You can also mute messages or group chats, like this:

Although it is firmly focused on work, LinkedIn is social media. But since it has a well-deserved reputation for smug humble-brags, you may want to tweak your feed. Sadly, you only have a couple of options. You can mute people or pages you are not connected to (they may appear in your feed because connections commented, reacted, or shared). Here's how:

Reece Rogers

Parker Hall

Brenda Stolyar

Julian Chokkattu

You can also remove people you are connected to from your feed by unfollowing them. LinkedIn does not tell them that you have unfollowed them, and you will still be connected. But LinkedIn will notify them if you should decide to follow them again in the future.

If you have group chats blowing up your phone or someone in your life who messages a little too much, you can mute those chats. Here's how:

You can also mute people by visiting their profile page.

Decide how long to mute for (8 hours, 1 week, or Always).