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Does Twitter’s mute button work on TV spoilers?

Carly Mallenbaum

USA TODAY

Twitter is letting its users mute words, with options of where to mute the words from (timeline and/or notifications) and for how long (24 hours to forever).

“Don’t tell me what happened!”

Isn’t that something you’d like to yell at Twitter when you haven’t yet seen that TV finale everyone's talking about? Good news: The social media app might be able to silence spoilers for you.

Twitter announced earlier this month that it's offering a mute option to help curb abuse on the app. But another potential benefit of the button is eliminating sports scores, character deaths and finale surprises from your timeline.

But does it work?

I tried the button out after the series finale of Bones Tuesday night. (If you DO want to know what happened on the episode, go here.)

After the show aired, “#BonesFinale” was a trend attached to tweets about the what happened in the episode. So, to mute those people on twitter.com (Twitter says this process should also work on Android and iOs, too), I went to Notifications>Settings>Muted words and clicked “Add.” (Twitter’s support page explains how to do this on mobile, too. )

Here's what the "Muted words" tab looks like.

I added a few Bones terms to mute, and set the mute time (which you can access by clicking the pencil icon) for 24 hours. Other options: Forever, 7 days and 30 days.

Twitter gives you the option to mute a list of words.

And it was all set.

Then, I went through my timeline. Drumroll, please!

That tweet that I know our critic Robert Bianco just sent about the finale? It wasn’t listed. (However, it’s there if I click on Robert’s page.) As for the rest of the tweets I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled through? None of them were about Bones. And I follow plenty of critics and TV live-tweeters.

So... SUCCESS! We may have something better than those all-caps “SPOILER ALERT” disclaimers, after all.