Twitter privacy settings & safety

For Twitter’s privacy and safety settings, go to the Twitter app and click on their profile image to see the menu. Select the ‘Settings and Privacy’ option from the menu.

On the next menu, select ‘Privacy and safety’.

Under ‘Audience and tagging‘  make sure the option for ‘Protect your tweets‘ is selected so that only followers and people you approve can see your child’s tweets.

Photo tagging – in the same menu, select ‘Photo tagging’ to bring up the menu. Set this to ‘Only people you follow can tag you’.

Direct Messages – back in Twitter’s ‘Privacy and safety’ menu, select ‘Direct messages’ to bring up the menu. Keep ‘Allow message requests from everyone’ unselected so only people your child follows can send direct messages to them.

Content you see – Keep ‘Display media that may contain sensitive content’ unselected to manage the content your child sees.

Topics – Manage which topics your child sees first to encourage focussed browsing.

Explore settings – Set content location for the explore feature on Twitter.

Search settings – Hide sensitive content from searches and remove blocked or muted accounts from searches.

Discoverability and contacts – If these options are selected, people are unable to find your child by searching for their mobile number or email address.

Safety mode – Select Twitter’s safety mode to automatically block abusive and spammy accounts. This is a temporary setting that will turn off after a select number of days.

When the safety mode period ends, your child will receive a notification that recaps who was blocked during this period.

Safety mode will need to be set again after each period.

Reporting and blocking

To block a person, go to their Twitter profile click on the three buttons on the top of the screen and select ‘Block’ and they will no longer see your child’s account.

To report, select ‘report’ from the same menu and add the reason why you are reporting them.

To mute, so your child does not see their content, select mute from the menu.

These options are also available on tweets themselves.