5 X Settings to Filter Your Feed (Stop the Ragebait)
By Ted · February 27, 2026
X’s algorithm does not distinguish frustration from approval. A hate-click, a rage-reply, and a genuine like all register as engagement—and engagement is what decides which posts appear in your For You feed. That is why the same political fight from an account you’ve never heard of keeps surfacing no matter how many times you tap Not Interested.
Most of the filtering tools X provides are weak reactive signals that the algorithm can easily override. But a handful of settings work at a deeper level, intercepting unwanted content before it ever reaches your screen and before your reaction can feed the cycle.
Below are five settings that produce a measurable change in what X shows you, along with the specific limitations of each one.
Setting 1: Muted Words
Muted Words is the most powerful proactive filter X offers. Rather than teaching the algorithm to behave differently, it builds a text-based wall that removes matching posts before you ever see them—and before your reaction to those posts can become training data.
To set it up, go to More → Settings and Privacy → Privacy and Safety → Mute and Block → Muted Words. Tap the plus icon to add a term. Each entry can be scoped by duration—24 hours for spoilers, 7 days for trending noise, 30 days for election cycles, or forever for permanent filters.
The most important option is scope. Setting it to "From people you don’t follow" ensures that accounts you chose to follow can still discuss a topic, while strangers cannot flood your feed with it. You can mute words, phrases, hashtags, emojis, and specific usernames, and each entry gets its own independent duration and scope.
One detail worth noting: muting a hashtag (e.g. #politics) only catches posts that use the hashtag itself, while muting the bare word (politics) catches every post containing it. For thorough coverage, add both.
The catch: this filter is text-only. Images without captions and videos without on-screen text pass through entirely, and any engagement with that content still feeds the algorithm. Building a comprehensive muted-words list is also significantly faster on a desktop browser than on the mobile app.
Setting 2: Mute Accounts (Not Block)
When the problem is a specific account rather than a topic, Mute is now the correct tool—not Block. In late 2024, X changed how blocking works for public accounts: blocked users can still view your posts, they simply cannot like, reply, or repost them. For private accounts, blocking still functions as before, but for public profiles the feature was effectively redesigned to protect platform engagement rather than user experience.
Muting an account removes its content from your feed entirely and the account is never notified. To mute someone, visit their profile, tap the three-dot menu in the upper right, and select Mute.
If the goal is a cleaner feed rather than personal safety, Mute achieves it without the weakened protections of the current Block implementation.
Setting 3: Not Interested & Show Less Often
Where Muted Words and Muted Accounts are proactive—filtering content before it reaches you—the Not Interested and Show Less Often buttons are reactive. They only fire after a post has already appeared in your feed, but they still serve as a useful second layer of training.
Tapping the three dots on any For You post reveals both options. Not Interested signals that you do not want that content type. Show Less Often reduces the frequency of posts from that specific account without fully muting it.
The catch: these are weak signals. The algorithm weighs a single tap against engagement data from millions of other users. A post with 50,000 quote-tweets will not disappear from your feed immediately because you clicked Not Interested once. These buttons shift your feed gradually over weeks, so they need to be layered on top of a solid Muted Words list rather than relied on alone.
Setting 4: Sensitive Content Toggle
X has a toggle that controls whether violence, sexual content, and graphic material appear in your feed, but it is hidden behind a platform restriction most users never encounter. Apple’s App Store policies prevent the toggle from appearing in the iOS app, and X keeps Android consistent with iOS. The setting only exists on the web.
To access it, log in at x.com (desktop or mobile browser) and navigate to Settings → Privacy and Safety → Content You See. Changes made on the web sync to the app after a restart.
This is strictly a content-type classification filter. It does not affect ragebait, political content, or spam—only material X has categorized as sensitive. Its absence from the native apps is not an oversight; it is a direct consequence of platform-level policy decisions made outside X’s control.
Setting 5: The Following Tab
Every setting above works within or against the For You algorithm. The Following tab bypasses it entirely. It shows only posts from accounts you explicitly follow, with no algorithmic ranking optimized for engagement.
At the top of your feed, tap Following. By default the tab opens to Popular, which still applies some algorithmic sorting. To get a true chronological feed, tap the dropdown and switch to Recent.
The Following tab on Recent is the only way to use X without the engagement-optimization layer. The For You feed remains useful for discovery, but the Following tab is where the platform functions on your terms. For day-to-day use, it is the most effective structural change you can make.
The algorithm only wins when you react to the content it surfaces. Set up your Muted Words to intercept that content before the reaction starts, and the feed changes permanently.