Here’s how to turn off Twitter’s weird new refresh sound

For those that aren’t fans of the chirp

Recently, Twitter users noticed that the app has started making a new sound — when you pull down to refresh your timeline, notifications, DMs, or pretty much anything else in the official app, there’s a robotic chirp sound that sounds like a futuristic bird or frog. The sound has been polarizing — some people have been mesmerized by it, while others hate it.

Thankfully, there are a few ways to make sure you don’t hear it, which I’ll cover in this article.

Set your phone to silent

The first is astoundingly simple: according to my tests, turning your phone to silent mode makes it so that the sound doesn’t play. On iPhones, that means flipping the ringer switch on the left side of the phone above the volume buttons so the switch is closer to the back of the phone.

The pull-to-refresh sound doesn’t appear to have rolled out to every Android phone (and indeed, it appears to be a different sound). If you do have it, though, you can generally silence your ringer through the menu that shows up after you use the volume buttons or by going to settings and setting your phone to vibrate or mute.

Samsung’s current interface for managing volume — turning the third slider down all the way puts your phone on vibrate, silencing Twitter’s refresh noise.

Setting a Pixel 2 to vibrate, then silent.

Turn off Twitter’s sound effects

Of course, muting your phone isn’t an ideal solution if you want your phone to make other noises, like when you get a call or text. The good news is that Twitter spokesperson Trenton Kennedy shared a video on Wednesday showing an option in the Twitter app that lets you turn off the sound.

On iOS, you can access it by going to the Twitter app and tapping on your profile picture in the top left. Then, go to Settings and Privacy > Accessibility, display, and languages > Display and Sound. Under the Sound heading, toggle Sound effects off.

The sound effects toggle in the iOS (left) and Android (right) versions of the Twitter app.

In the Android version of the app, the menu has slightly different labels and options. In the Twitter app, go to Settings and Privacy > Accessibility, display and languages > Display, and toggle Sound effects off.

After you’ve turned off the toggle, you should no longer hear the sound when you refresh a page. While, in theory, this will turn off other sound effects in the app, I wasn’t able to find any prominent ones that played when I had the toggle on, apart from the pull-to-refresh one.

Enjoy your silent refreshing!

Here’s how to turn off Twitter’s weird new refresh sound