How to Avoid Spoilers Online and in Chats

With multiple streaming services to choose from and the entire history of cinema and television to dig into, you’d be forgiven for not being quite up-to-date with the latest films and shows. That’s where spoilers can hit you.

Whether it’s a twisty Netflix thriller or the season finale of a show on Apple TV, there will be times when you haven’t gotten around to watching something and yet you don’t want the plot spoiled for you. When you’re in that scenario, going online is fraught with risk.

You can’t ever eliminate that risk entirely, but there are ways to minimize the chances of something being spoiled for you.

Mute Your Socials

Courtesy of David Nield

Many of the biggest social media platforms come with ways for muting posts that contain certain words, giving you a way of hiding content mentioning specific movies and shows. For this to really work, you have to pick your muted words carefully, and you might want to include acronyms and abbreviations for the content in question, just to be sure.

On X, for example, you can open up Settings and privacy from the left-hand menu on desktop or mobile, then choose Privacy and safety > Mute and block > Muted words. Any posts containing the words you specify here won’t show up on your timeline and won’t trigger any notifications inside the app. For each word or phrase, you can also set a time period for the muting to be in effect.

If Bluesky is your social platform of choice, open up Settings from the navigation menu on the left, then pick Moderation > Muted words & tags. As with X, you can choose to have words muted for a certain time period or until you unmute them again. Threads has something similar under Hidden Words in the Privacy menu.

Use Browser Extensions

Blocking words in Spoiler Protection.Courtesy of David Nield

One of the key benefits of using browser extensions to avoid spoilers is that they can cover every website you visit, including social media sites. They’re not infallible when it comes to hiding everything that needs to be hidden, but they can certainly help.