On May 12, Twitter began rolling out a new account feature called ‘mute’ to users of their iPhone and Android apps as well as on twitter.com. In a blog post, Twitter Product Manager Paul Rosania explained that the mute function will remove a user’s content “from key parts of your Twitter experience”.
“In the same way you can turn on device notifications so you never miss a Tweet from your favorite users, you can now mute users you’d like to hear from less,” Rosania explained. Basically, a muted Twitter user’s tweets or retweets do not show up on your timeline. Any push or SMS notifications from the muted user will not be displayed.
While the muted user can still interact with your tweets, from favouriting them to replying to them or retweeting them, you are simply not made aware of the activity. “The muted user will not know that you’ve muted them, and of course you can unmute at any time,” Rosania noted.
More details are available at the Help Center. Users can be muted from a tweet or from their profile page, and a red speaker symbol with a line through it is displayed to show that user is muted.
Some may ask why mute a user when you could just unfollow the person, or block him or her. Well, this feature is especially useful with rotated curated accounts – accounts which are taken over for short periods of time by different people such as @hellofrmsg, or when the user is live tweeting about events that you might not be interested in, say a football game if you are not a football fan.