How to tell if someone has muted you on Twitter: Secret trick allows you to see who has hidden your tweets

Mutes are supposed to be the secret version of blocks — but if you suspect someone of ignoring you then there’s actually a way of finding out

An illustration picture shows the Twitter logo reflected in the eye of a woman in Berlin, November 7, 2013 (Reuters)

A simple trick makes it terrifyingly easy to see whether or not someone has muted you on Twitter.

Mutes are supposed to be the secret version of blocks — allowing you to hide a person’s tweets from your timeline without them ever knowing. But there might be a way around that secrecy, allowing you to check whether someone has decided to quietly ignore you.

The trick is roundabout and a little complicated. It also allows you only to check on one specific person at a time, so it’s not possible to see everyone who has muted you.

It’s done by opening up Tweetdeck and making a “Home” column for the person you suspect has muted you. If you don’t appear in there, then you’re muted — you can do a tweet to be sure.

The trick seems to work because the Home column is created to let you see Twitter as a specific person does. That includes not seeing your tweets, if you’ve been muted.

If you want to see whether other people have muted you, then you’ll have to go into Tweetdeck and create a new Home column for each person.

Twitter created the mute feature apparently to let people ignore a person’s tweets without going through the public and divisive process of unfollowing or blocking, and it also ensures that you will see tweets that include your own handle. But because of that, finding out whether someone has done it to you is next to impossible — apart from the above trick, the only other way is either to ask directly or to flagrantly tweet about the person when you know they are online, and see if they notice.

There is a separate mute feature on TweetDeck, which can be accessed either through the Settings or by clicking on the three dots at the bottom-right of any tweet. Accounts muted through that method still show up on the Twitter website and don't appear to show when using the above trick.

Seeing your own muted accounts is much simpler, and is done through an official Twitter page. Heading to Settings and look down the left for “Muted accounts”, which will show a long list of everyone that you have muted.