How to hide “What’s happening” trending topics on Twitter.com (and more, working June 2023)

Adam Greenough · 1st July 2021 · Filed under

Updated 6 June 2023

Twitter can be a great source of connections, industry news and light-hearted fun (if you follow the right people!). Unfortunately, the “What’s happening” trending topics sidebar can be a constant source of misery that by now can be simply too much to bear.

If you’d rather keep on top of your news and trends in a more mindful way rather than have it shoved in your face every time you browse your feed on a desktop browser then here’s what you can do.

uBlock Origin

uBlock Origin (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) is a fantastic ad blocking tool which blocks a huge array of banner advertisements, analytics, tracking and even Twitter promoted posts and YouTube video ads.

No – this post isn’t sponsored or affiliated – it’s really just that great. Browsing the web without can really be a miserable experience.

As a bonus, it also comes with a nifty feature that allows you to set your own blocking rules.

Once installed, click the uBlock Origin button in your browser toolbar and select the ‘Dashboard’ icon (looks like three cogs). On the dashboard page, select ‘My Filters’ from the top bar.

Screenshot showing the uBlock interface to block the Twitter What's Happening trends sidebar
After installing uBlock Origin, click the icon in the toolbar (may be hidden behind an extension button) and then the dashboard page that looks like 3 cogs

The ‘My Filters’ page will show a large text box. You may find it empty or populated with custom rules you have already created. We’re able to add to this list to block any elements we please. Simply paste in your desired filters from the filter rules section below and select ‘Apply Changes’ when done.

Screenshot showing the uBlock filters interface to block the Twitter What's Happening trends sidebar
The my filters page allows you to paste in and save custom filters to block and hide elements on any webpage

Filter Rules

Twitter’s dynamically generated HTML & CSS classes can make targeting specific elements a little fiddly. Fortunately, there are a number of accessibility labels and other fingerprints we can target to purge the website of unwanted features.

The Twitter website showing the "What's Happening" sidebar removed
The Twitter website showing the “What’s Happening” sidebar removed

Hide the ‘What’s happening’ sidebar on Twitter

Add the following filter rule to your uBlock configuration as per the instructions above.

! Hide the 'What's happening' sidebar on Twitter.com
twitter.com##*[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]

How to hide the ‘Topics to follow’ sidebar on Twitter

Add the following filter rule to your uBlock configuration as per the instructions above.

! Hide the 'Topics to follow' sidebar on Twitter.com
twitter.com##*[aria-label="Timeline: "]

How to hide “Who to follow” sidebar on Twitter

! Hide the 'Who to follow' sidebar on Twitter.com
twitter.com##*[aria-label="Who to follow"]

Hide everything in sidebar except search bar

! Hide everything in sidebar except search bar on Twitter.com
twitter.com##*[data-testid="sidebarColumn"] aside

Hide the bottom messages panel on Twitter

! Hide the bottom message panel Twitter.com
twitter.com##*[data-testid="DMDrawerHeader"]

How to disable the new Twitter “Chirp” font

Not a fan of the new Twitter font? Add the following URLs to your filters list in uBlock to block the new Twitter “Chirp” font from loading and revert back to a default font.

https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-regular-web.woff
https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-medium-web.woff
https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-heavy-web.woff
https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-bold-web.woff

Hope that helps!

Please leave a message in the comments if it works for you and if you’d like any other tweaks to Twitter or any other websites using this method.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  1. paul says:

    Any update on this? It stopped working

  2. V says:

    This is very useful. However, it only seems to work correctly if your display language on the Twitter website is set to English.

    In my case, I had it set to Spanish, and was still seeing some of these elements (I tried adding all of the custom fliters above).

    Once I set my language to English, the unwanted content was correctly hidden.

    If you know how to achieve this result in other languages, it would be appreciated, as it is not my preference to have my interface in English.

    Thank you for the help though. This is an acceptable compromise!!

  3. Ian says:

    This is great!

  4. Sarah says:

    Fantastic! thank you!

  5. side says:

    thanks for such a clear and straight-to-the-point answer!

  6. John Sanabria says:

    Very cool! Thanks for sharing!

  7. Jeremy says:

    Life changing! Thanks!

  8. Thomas harlan says:

    This also works on Brave; right-click on the twitter home page, choose the Brave option, then Manage Custom Filters. There’s a box at the bottom of that page where you can paste these filters in. Then reload Twitter.

  9. Ikenna Nwaiwu says:

    Thank you so much for this Adam! Much appreciated.

  10. A Person says:

    Amazing, Finally the trash in that field is no more. Thanks a lot.

  11. Modifier says:

    Wow thank you so much!!
    Extremely helpful.

  12. Aaron DeLand says:

    YESSSSS! I hate angry clickbait Twitter trends. Be gone with this awesome extension!

  13. Nick says:

    Is it possible to block EVERYONE and then only permit people that I know and want to follow and see in my feed. Serious! 99.9% of twitter is noise, I’d love to block it all and permit what I want. Possible?

  14. Dick Smith says:

    Three cheers!

  15. Mario C says:

    Thanks so much, this was awesome advice.

  16. Hikaru says:

    I can’t thank you enough!

  17. Rose says:

    Thank you for this!

  18. Hionest Person says:

    Brilliant!
    Man screw twitter and the crappy news articles!

  19. JC says:

    You are a blessing. THANK YOU.

  20. boris says:

    Absolutely awesome … thank you!

  21. jeff says:

    hey, is there a way to block #explore/trending? got a bad habit of clicking in

  22. ivan says:

    thankyou!!

  23. Y says:

    This totally saved me, thank you!!

  24. ps says:

    brilliant, thanks!

  25. Rand Omguy says:

    Oh thank god for this. Normally I like the what’s happening to get random little things of news, especially when it’s stuff about things me and my friends like like game news. But recently topics have been about stuff I really don’t like or want to see and since you can’t seem to edit that stuff in any meaningful way and even if you say ‘hey I don’t like this’ it will show you the same stuff over and over after like a week or two just with slightly different wording…

    better to get rid of it, IMO

  26. Kuj says:

    Amazing, thank you

  27. Ben says:

    Thanks for the very helpful blog post!

    To (mostly) hide “Who to follow”, add

    ! Hide the ‘Who to follow’ sidebar on Twitter.com
    twitter.com##*[aria-label=”Who to follow”]

  28. Arvind Balasubramaniam says:

    Very cool. Thank you.
    Also add the following to remove the “who to follow” sidebar:
    twitter.com##*[aria-label=”Who to follow”]

  29. HWang says:

    You can remove the entire right sidebar with twitter.com##[data-testid=”sidebarColumn”]

  30. H W says:

    This was helpful! I started with this and was able to take this a step further to hide the right sidebar altogether:

    ! Hide the entire right sidebar
    twitter.com##[data-testid=”sidebarColumn”]

  31. John Susko says:

    THIS IS AWESOME !!!!

    Question: how do I block the “who to follow” panel too?

  32. Robervall Taylor says:

    To revert to the Segoe UI font, I use this rule inside of Stylish:

    * {font-family: “Segoe UI”,Roboto,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif !important;}

  33. Luis says:

    THANK YOU SO MUCH! I Hated that stupid what’s happening tab so fucking much !!

  34. yossarian says:

    Thank you KingπŸ‘‘

  35. GlitchForum says:

    Wow, thanks! Really hated that tab lmao.

  36. Heather says:

    Amazing! Thank you so much for sharing this!

  37. Dude says:

    Yaaaaah that’s so much better, thanks dude

  38. John says:

    Good man! To my surprise, it worked!

    Thank you.

  39. Nux says:

    Oh so much better. Thank you!

  40. Daniel Maloney II says:

    THANK YOU SO MUCH!

  41. anna says:

    If you want to block “Who to follow” this should work:

    twitter.com##*[aria-label=”Who to follow”]

    I pasted it into MyFilters in Adblock Plus and it did the trick!

  42. SD says:

    life saver right there, thank you!

  43. Brian Fitzgerald says:

    You absolute legend, thank you so much!

  44. tangy jake says:

    Excellent Thank You

  45. Adventago says:

    Oh my gosh you are a legend

    Thank you so much!!!

    I was sick and tired of seeing all the depressing, annoying, and irrelevant news

    Now I can finally do what I want rather than being sucked into a stupid keyboard warrior battle with someone else on Twitter

    πŸ™‚

  46. diane says:

    thank you so much!

  47. Technomistress says:

    This is brilliant – thank you!!!

  48. carina says:

    oh thank you so much for this!!

  49. Praveen Kumar says:

    Thanks for this tip… also can u please help me how to also hide who to follow – its irritating

  50. LIMO says:

    It works!!! Thanks! So sick of being bombarded with toxic misinformation about doom and destruction that I can’t do anything about anyway. I just want to peacefully look at art created by the artists I follow, is that too much to ask? (according to twitter, apparently yes, it is…). Anyway thanks again!

  51. David Schwaiger says:

    Works great!

  52. Rajkamal Rao says:

    Thanks a lot for this trick. It works fine – and in this polarized environment, a God send.