I’m not here to judge anyone who pays for Twitter Blue. However, I’m not a fan of pay-to-win mechanics. At this point, Twitter is a game where players compete for the most attention; Twitter Blue is overpowered DLC. If you buy a subscription, your tweets are shown at the top of comment threads and prioritized in other contexts, including the “For You” page. This makes Blue the social media equivalent of paying for unlimited ammo or improved body armor, regardless of who you are or whether what you have to say is worth promoting.
It also makes Twitter really annoying to use. No one wants to play with the people who are paying to win. That’s why there’s so much mockery of, and desire to avoid, Twitter Blue users.
Granted, there are plenty of reasons why longtime Twitter power users—in particular, public figures or people who historically have trouble with impersonators—might pay for Twitter Blue. No one wants to lose an audience they worked hard to build, and Twitter has the right to monetize itself however it likes. You also have the right to consume (or not consume) the social media you choose.
All the same, it can’t be denied that a lot of really annoying posts from Twitter Blue users with low follower counts show up in all kinds of contexts. If you don’t want to see those posts, I don’t blame you, and here’s how you can filter them all out:
Blue Lite Blocker
Twitter via Justin Pot
BlueLiteBlocker is a free, open-source browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that can filter comments from Twitter Blue subscribers out of your Twitter timeline. You can install the extension and then use Twitter the way you normally do. All comments from Twitter Blue users will be obscured—you can click “View” if you are absolutely certain you want to see them.
Unlike some extensions (BluesBlocker, for example, or Twitter Blue Blocker), Blue Lite Blocker doesn’t affect anyone that you actively follow, meaning it won’t accidentally filter out your friends. The extension also allows you to still see the tweets from Twitter Blue users that have a certain number of followers—the default threshold is 100,000, but you can set it to whatever you want.
Twitter via Justin Pot
These two features make Blue Lite Blocker the perfect compromise. It filters out the annoying Twitter Blue users while not affecting the people you care about and the public figures whose posts you might want to see. If there’s a Twitter Blue user with a lot of followers who you don’t want to see, you can block or mute them manually.
Other Workarounds to Clean Up Twitter
Blue Lite Blocker isn’t a perfect solution. It requires a browser extension, which not everyone is going to like, and it doesn’t help on mobile (not that there’s much help on mobile anyway). There are a few alternatives, though.
Twitter via Justin Pot
The first is to make sure you’re using the Following tab instead of For You. This tab is just tweets from the people you follow, so it doesn’t artificially favor Twitter Blue subscribers. You could also try blocking all retweets if you want to clean things up a little more.
If that’s not enough, you could try TweetDeck, the power user’s version of Twitter. This tool doesn’t have a For You page or any algorithmic sorting, meaning Twitter Blue users aren’t artificially boosted on it. TweetDeck is the one part of Twitter that’s completely untouched by the recent changes there, and I hope this doesn’t change. (So please, no one tell Elon Musk that TweetDeck still exists.)
Another cool extension, if you miss seeing legacy checkmarks, is Eight Dollars. Right now blue checkmarks only show up if someone is paying for Blue, meaning most people who had a checkmark prior to April 20, 2023 no longer have one. Eight Dollars can show you which users were verified before legacy verified checkmarks were removed, which is useful if you trusted the old system.
There’s a cat and mouse element to all of this, of course. Twitter’s current regime really, really wants to turn Blue checkmarks into sellable status symbols and any tool that diminishes the visibility of Blue subscribers cuts against that goal. They’re going to try to find a way to break this, and all similar, tools. For now, though, they work—use them while you can.
Or you could just abandon your Twitter account, set up a public archive of your tweets, and learn how to get started on Mastodon or Bluesky. Up to you.
