Twitter, a social media site that verifies Nazis, is legally required to hide Nazi content and symbols in Germany and France. You can take advantage of this without moving to Germany.
Photo by Cogiati
Twitter user Christa Peterson discovered that you can just tell Twitter you’re in Germany, and it will try to hide Nazi accounts and tweets:
One Weird Trick to get nazi imagery off twitter pic.twitter.com/pCDvRu5JwY
— MicHELL?Spookcault (@christapeterso) October 12, 2017
Twitter lists these instructions on a support page, but it doesn’t mention that you can hide Nazis this way. (A separate page explains content withholding.) Here’s how to do it:
1. From the Twitter homepage, click your avatar on the top right.
2. From the drop-down menu, select “Settings and privacy.”
3. In the third section, “Content,” change your country to Germany.
Now any new page will load with Germany’s content filters in place.
Of course, because Twitter is awful, it only hides some of the Nazis, but it’s better than nothing. Here’s a comparison of the top profile results for “National Socialism” before and after I changed my settings:
Barack Obama: Still not a Nazi.
If you try to view a flagged account, you get this:
The filter also applies to specific flagged tweets. Here’s conservative Christian author and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza lying about the Holocaust, before and after:
Your trending topics and language preference stay the same. So does the location displayed on your profile page. We’ve noticed one bonus: The Moments tab disappears.
As user CanolaYogurt points out, Twitter saves the setting in your browser, not your account. So you can log into other accounts and you’ll still get German filtering. But you’ll need to re-apply the setting in every different browser or computer you use.
So far I haven’t found this setting in Twitter’s mobile app. One more reason to delete Twitter off your phone.
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