Twitter Is a Terrible Place to Post Spoilers

Nearly everyone seems to hate spoilers…but not quite enough for some people to stop posting them, often unlabeled, online.  Avoiding spoilers has become something of a herculean task, as fans of books, TV shows, video games, and more have to avoid everything from blog posts to videos to fan art to every social media platform.  Of all these things, however, I maintain that Twitter is one of the most annoying places for people to post spoilers.

Unless the creator literally titles their blog post or Youtube video something like, “Character X Dies in [Book Title],” fans who want to avoid spoilers can easily avoid reading any blog post or article or watching any video that so much as mentions the book, regardless of whether it is labeled “Warning: Spoilers” or “Spoiler-Free” or not labelled at all.  It’s harder but still doable to avoid spoilers on platforms like Instagram; don’t read the caption of any post that has a photo of the book, and don’t click on the “read more” option to read the whole caption.

Twitter is a whole different story.  While well-meaning fans will label spoilery tweets with a hashtag, and other people can then choose to “mute” that hashtag, this system is not full proof.  People might use different hashtags.  Readers might see spoilers before they can mute them.  Fans serious about avoiding spoilers on Twitter are left to frantically mute hashtags, book titles, abbreviation of book titles, author names, major character names, and any other identifying detail from the book that might pop up in their feed—and they often have to do this before the book is even released.  Recently, readers who received their preorders of Holly Black’s The Queen of Nothing were posting spoilers before other people could even purchase the book, much less find the time to read it.  Anyone who failed to mute all possible keywords early was out of luck.

The scrolling nature of Twitter also makes it much easier to see spoilers accidentally than on other platforms.  Something might actually be labeled “spoiler,” but a reader will have scrolled past that and read the entire tweet before noticing.  This is true even when people attempt to “hide” the spoiler by writing “spoiler” at the top and following it with a bunch of periods.  For example:

Spoiler
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Character X dies.

Someone mindlessly scrolling down their phone can inadvertently get to the “character x dies” part without having read or registered the spoiler warning at top.  (And, yes, I have seen tweets with supposed spoiler warnings that literally just said “spoilers ahead” without specifying what exactly it was a spoiler for.)

Is there anything to be done?  Personally, I’d love it people would just…not post spoilers the day something is released or several days before it’s released, but I know that’s not going to happen.  People read (or watch or play) things and want to talk about them, and they’re not necessarily thinking about whether they’re spoiling it for others.  I would love it if people would keep these conversations to DMs or blog posts or other places where they can be much more easily avoided rather than on Twitter, but I realize the only truly practical thing to do is to attempt to mute any possible word related to the content you don’t want spoiled.

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