There’s one feature on a lot of messaging apps that’s one main feature is to basically get you in trouble: read receipts.
While it’s great to be able to know if the person you’re talking to has read your messages, it’s never a benefit to you for others to know this.
“He clearly saw the message! Why hasn’t he responded?!”
It’s because of sentences like the above, that most people I know have read receipts off on all their supported apps (except maybe my mom). And, sure, while not everyone receiving messages from you will say things like the above, I still struggle to find a positive reason for being the person with read receipts on (Being able to see other peoples’, however? That’s fantastic!).
If you agree with that, then here’s a quick tutorial on how to turn off read receipts on the most popular social networks.
Open the Twitter app.
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Tap your profile picture.
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Tap on Settings.
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Tap on Privacy.
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Tap on Direct Messages.
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Turn off Read Receipts.
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Open the WhatsApp app.
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Tap on the three dots at the top right.
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Tap Settings.
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Tap Account.
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Tap Privacy.
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Clik here to view.
Turn off Read Receipts.
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iMessage
For iMessage on iOS, go to Settings.
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Tap on Messages.
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Under iMessage, turn off Read Receipts.
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Facebook Messenger & Instagram
Facebook and Instagram are a bit more complicated. They don’t actually have options for turning off read receipts, instead, you need to sort of trick them into thinking you never saw the messages by using Airplane Mode. Here’s how.
Turn on Airplane Mode after you received the messages you want to read.
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Open Messenger or Instagram.
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Go to the messages on either Facebook or Instagram and read them.
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Open multitasking (double tap the home button on iOS or tap the multitasking button on Android) and swipe the app away Messenger/Instagram so it closes completely (instead of just going home with the home button as this won’t close it properly).
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Turn airplane mode back off and since you didn’t have signal when reading the messages, it should still show them as unread to the other person.
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And there you go, no more read receipts and no more getting in trouble for out of habit reading things before you have a chance to reply (not just me that does that, right?). Let me know if this helped you or other tutorials you’d like to see below and don’t forget to follow me on social for more tech news and tech stuff.
Read More: How to Turn off Read Receipts on All Your Social Networks