How to hide replies on Twitter

Twitter can be a fun place to share jokes and connect with people, the same way joining the army can be a fun way to travel the world. The social media platform has become notorious as a cesspit of bad faith arguments and verbal abuse, the online equivalent of a dodgy dive bar at 2 a.m. Fortunately, Twitter has some tools to help make your time there a bit less self-destructive — one of which is the ability to hide replies to your tweets.

Introduced in 2019, Twitter's hide reply function allows you to moderate your profile to some extent by shoving other people's vitriol toward your posts out of sight.

To be clear, hiding a reply doesn't get rid of it completely. Sadly, there is still no way to delete someone else's tweet. What this feature does instead is hide the offending reply so it isn't immediately visible to anyone who peruses your original tweet.

Here's how to hide a reply on Twitter.

1. Open Twitter.

2. Click or tap on the tweet that the unwanted reply is responding to.

3. Scroll down to the reply that you want hidden, and tap the "..." button in the top right corner of it. This will open up a menu of options.

4. From the menu, select "Hide reply."

If it's your first time hiding a reply, you may get a popup explaining what hiding replies does, and giving you a link to more information. You may also get a popup asking if you'd also like to block the person whose tweet you're hiding, which is something to consider, particularly if they're a repeat offender. If it's a bunch of different users, you can also stop the pile-on by limiting who replies to your tweet.

Once hidden, the reply will no longer appear amongst the responses to your tweet, moved instead to a separate page. Anyone who wants to see the tweets you've hidden can still do so, but they'll need to go through the deliberate extra step of clicking on the dotted square icon in the bottom right corner of the original tweet.

You can also unhide tweets by clicking on said dotted square icon, hitting the "..." button next to the tweet you want to unhide, and selecting "Unhide reply."

Unfortunately there is an element of Streisand Effect to the entire business — if someone sees that tweets have been hidden, they're probably going to want to know what they are. But at the very least hiding tweets keeps Twitter's nastiness under the rug while guests are passing through.