Ads and Promoted Tweets Suck

I like to occasionally go through my Twitter feed and read interesting posts or articles in the tech space.

People love to complain about the vitriol on Twitter, so I’ll skip that. What really grinds my gears is scrolling through interesting Tweets only to have to scroll past a huge “Promoted” Tweet. They really make the experience jarring, and I’m very unlikely to ever intentionally click on one of these ads.

I decided to find a way to block them. I poked around and found an answer but it required a bit of massaging to actually work, and most of it is unnecessary.

Setup the Block

If you have uBlock origin, click on the badge in the URL bar and then click on the collection of gears towards the right to open the dashboard. Once in the dashboard, click on the “My filters” tab and add this line:

twitter.com##:xpath(//span[(text()='Promoted')]/../../../../..)

There you have it. This will break at some point once the Twitter police found out I’ve given up their secret. From then on, enjoy a better Twitter experience!

Update (12/12/2021):

Well, it’s still working. I even tweeted this blog out on Twitter (so edgy), and no one cared…

Anyways, I hope you’re using this and sticking it to the man, and having a, um, uh, a whatever kind of better experience on Twitter you can without ads.

If you find this stops working, please drop me a line. My email is at the bottom of every page of this blog, for better or worse for my inbox.

Also, if there’s something else on Twitter that’s ruining your experience, at least, in terms of DOM elements, let me know and I’ll try to add it to the block list.