With multiple transmission services to choose from and all the history of film and television to delve into, you’d be forgiven for not being up to date with the latest movies and shows. That’s where spoilers can affect you.

Whether it’s a twisted thriller on Netflix or the season finale of a show on Apple TV, there will be times when you haven’t been able to watch something and you still don’t want the plot spoiled for you. When you find yourself in that scenario, connecting to the Internet is full of risks.

You’ll never be able to eliminate that risk completely, but there are ways to minimize the chances of something getting ruined.

Silence your social networks

Courtesy of David Nield

Many of the major social media platforms have ways to mute posts that contain certain words, giving you a way to hide content that mentions specific movies and shows. For this to really work, you need to choose your muted words carefully, and you may want to include acronyms and abbreviations for the content in question, just to be safe.

In X, for example, you can open Settings and privacy from the left menu on desktop or mobile, then choose Privacy & Security > Mute & Block > Muted Words. Any posts containing the words you specify here will not appear on your timeline and will not trigger any in-app notifications. For each word or phrase, you can also set a time period for the mute to take effect.

If Bluesky is your preferred social platform, open up Settings in the navigation menu on the left, then select Moderation > Muted words and tags. As with X, you can choose to mute the words for a set period of time or until you unmute them again. Threads has something similar in hidden words in it Privacy menu.

Use browser extensions

Word blocking in Spoiler Protection.Courtesy of David Nield

One of the main benefits of using browser extensions to avoid spoilers is that they can cover all the websites you visit, including social media sites. They are not infallible when it comes to hiding everything that needs to be hidden, but they can certainly help.