How to Change Privacy Settings on X/Twitter - Full Guide
Every privacy control on X, what it actually restricts, and the handful worth changing from their defaults.
Where the Settings Live
All of the privacy controls are under Settings and privacy → Privacy and safety. The route here is the same on both desktop and mobile: click your profile icon, select Settings and privacy > Privacy & safety (desktop) or the top of the screen menu at the top right of your screen on mobile. It's a long screen consisting of different sections, so instead of scrolling past everything place use the menu on the left starting from the desktop app to take you directly to the category you want.
Both platforms do not have a separate privacy tab. The primary Settings page has Account, Privacy and safety, and Notifications as three separate entries, while Privacy and safety is the sweeping one that contains all the controls covered here. On the mobile app, the same menu comes up as a list after you hit your profile photo and tap Settings and privacy. Replace that screen to your bookmarks because nearly every request for you alter the visibility of your account happens there.
Audience and Tagging
Protect your posts is the most important setting on the entire screen. When this option is enabled, only followers you approve can see your posts, your likes and who you follow. In everyday anyone not accepted sees a blank profile with an aperture lock. It is enabled through Audience, then tag on Protect your posts and confirm. Current followers remain, but new users need to request to follow and you have to approve it.
Photo tagging falls under the same umbrella. The control allows you to decide who can tag you in photos, anyone, people you follow or no one. The option is 'to people you follow' for common place tags so that strangers aren't virgin to tag on your photo, and 'off' if you want no tagging at all! This applies only to tagging with photos, not mentions within text posts (which are governed by the Mentions controls under Notifications in the main settings menu).
Who Can Reach You
Also, there are two controls that relates to direct messages. The first one determines who can message you: Everyone, People I follow or Verified users. The second is a quality filter that sends messages from X that it considers low-quality away from your regular inbox and into a separate requests folder. If you are receiving unsolicited slides into your DMs from accounts you do not follow, leave the quality filter turned on and it catches most of them automatically.
Accounts that can find you by email or phone number are governed under discoverability and contacts. Both of them are turned on by default. To do so, open up the section and uncheck every option. The data prevents X from suggesting your account to those with your contact details in their phone AND does not cloak your email or phone from X itself, but it doesn't stop people who already know how to find you.
Content You See
These settings govern sensitive media and search filtering. The sensitive media toggle hides posts that are tagged as containing adult or violent content while the search filter takes out sensitive results from search queries. Both are on by default, which means you see a filtered feed already. For stricter control, that same section allows muted words, which will hide any post containing the chosen word, phrase or hashtag for a certain time period or forever.
The most useful, of these setting for everyday quality on the platform is muted words. Mute a show you haven't yet seen, a sports team while they are playing, or just a political term you don't want to hear about anymore. This muting will happen all over your timeline, notifications and search results at an instance. If you want to add one, just tap Muted words, type in the phrase you'd like to mute (or not), which people the mute applies to and how long it lasts. And there are literally no bounds as to the amount you can add.
Data and Personalisation
Default data extraction at X is by Ads preferences and Data sharing and personalisation. Under Ads preferences, turn off personalised ads to prevent X from targeting you based on your interests and browsing activity. Under Data sharing and personalisation, turn off inferred interests — which builds a profile of your topics based on your activity — and location personalisation, which means serving personalised ads and trending topics near you by using precise location.
X by default also shares data with business associates. In Data sharing and personalisation that can be toggled on or off as share data with business partners. Disabling it prevents X from sharing your account details with its marketing partners. All these configurations do not delete any user data that X already possesses, but each one prevents new collection and new sending. You should go through all four toggles in this section because each one is opt-out rather than opt-in.
Security and Connected Apps
The first thing to do is set up two-factorauthentication under Security and account access. If you can, choose the authentication app option instead of SMS, because SMS codes can be compromised. X now provides support for other authenticator apps, it only takes around two minutes to set one up. This is the single most powerful guard against account takeover, and it is totally independent of all privacy settings in the previous screen.
SIMILAR JAN 14TH : Audit Apps and sessions in the same section Each and every third-party app that you ever connected to X has a live token which allows it to act on your accout, and most people never revoke them. Revoke any app/sessions that you do not recognize or use anymore by going to Open Apps, reviewing the list and then revoking. Same for active sessions on other devices, which appears as a different entry. It only takes seconds and shuts down the access that may have been open for years.
There is no privacy control for who gets to read your past posts on a post-by-post basis. If you choose to protect your account, everything immediately disappears from eyes that are not followers; there is no gradual layering in those two states. If you need to delete something specific — a tweet or retweet, for example — and not your entire history, X doesn't give you any built-in tools to delete by date range or keyword, so your only granular option is to just delete it. TweetSweep delivers just that control, allowing you to delete age based or content specific posts whilst leaving everything else on your timeline untouched.