Twitter is a valuable platform for networking and disseminating information.

I regularly use TweetDeck from a desktop or MacBook to update various accounts. It’s probably the most popular and/or best app to use with Twitter. Like me, your town or city probably has its own set of hashtags created by users. Around here, we have #netde, #deltweet and #delaware to name a few. Recently, it seems that with elections coming up, paid political trolls from out of state (some as far away as Vegas) are spamming these channels with slander, mudslinging, and all the things people like me hate about politics. It’s a waste of time for me to listen to and read, and it is harmful to the Twitter platform especially here in Delaware where there has been initiative to engage non-tech users in new forms of communication. Political spam, or spam of any kind, endangers this small tweet-cosystem the community has formed by drowning out everyone with white noise of useless information.

The easy thing to do to hide someones tweets is to click on them, and select Block User. This does not hide that user from a hashtag stream, I found. @fishnchad tipped me off that TweetDeck has filtering settings, where you can hide tweets that contain certain words or hashtags. Click on the Settings button, then click Global Filters. For example, in Containing Words, you can put #tcot, #desen, #palin, #teaparty. This will hide any tweets containing any of those words. Problem solved, for me. Now the channels I frequent are much more cool and a lot less negative, trollish bullshit.