Make Twitter Non-Personalized Again

Many of you have probably heard about Twitter’s new privacy policy which was sold to you the same way these things always are: “to bring you a more personalized experience”. Obviously, this meant that more of your data is getting analyzed and sold to the highest bidder. I immediately encouraged my followers to opt-out of it, and since then also the great folks at EFF have written a guide on how to do so.

But what many Twitter users don’t know is that there are other ways that Twitter is already (and by default) doing to “enhance” your timeline. This is how you can opt-out from the rest of those settings:

 

1. Timeline
– Click the stars symbol top of the screen
– Switch from “top tweets” to “latest tweets”
(- Twitter keeps forcing this setting back to “Top tweets” every now and then, so make sure to check this periodically)

 

2. Personalization and data (link)
– Uncheck “Personalization and data”
– This should uncheck all the options below as well

 

3. Notifications (link)
– Uncheck “Quality filter”

 

4. Search settings (link)
– Uncheck “Hide sensitive content”

 

5. Trends (link)
– Uncheck “Trends for you”

 

5. Your Twitter Data (link)
– Review “Interest from Twitter” and “Interests from partners” and uncheck everything.

 

And if you thought that Twitter’s advertising ecosystem isn’t as massive and intruding as Facebook’s, check the numbers from your “Tailored audiences” section and think again..

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One of the best things about Twitter was the way it originally showed everything in chronological order. Unfortunately, the platform has been introducing recently (and more frequently) timeline altering changes – not to even mention the straight up censorship. With the settings covered in this blog post, I hope you can regain a bit of that original Twitter feeling back.