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How to block comments in Safari for iOS

Tired of trolls? Want faster-loading Web pages? This simple app stops comments sections from appearing in mobile sites.

Rick Broida Senior Editor
Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET's popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast (about the TV show Travelers). He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms (chronicled in the ebook "I Was a Middle-Aged Zombie").
Rick Broida
2 min read

As everyone knows, trolls ruin the Internet. (You know who you are.) But even a comments section not filled with haters can be a detriment, simply because of the bandwidth require to load it.

If you're using a desktop Web browser, there are any number of ways to block the comments sections on sites like YouTube and Politico. But mobile users haven't had the same options until now.

Shut Up: Comment Blocker is exactly what it sounds like: a comment blocker for iOS. Specifically, for Safari, the mobile browser used by most iPhone and iPad owners.

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Ricky Romero

The app takes advantage of the new content-blocking capabilities baked into iOS 9, the same ones that allow for the ad-blockers that recently shot to the top of the App Store charts.

Here's how to use Shut Up:

Step 1: Install the app.

Step 2: Open the Settings app, then scroll down until you find Safari. Tap it.

Step 3: Scroll down to Content Blockers and tap it.

Step 4: Enable Shut Up.

And that's it! Of course, you may not want to block every site's comments (CNET comes to mind, ahem), which is why the app has a whitelist option: Just run it and add any sites you don't want blocked. By default, Shut Up will continue to show comments for Dribbble, Facebook, Github, Reddit and Stackoverflow.

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Don't forget to add CNET to the whitelist. ;) Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET

This is a really useful tool, especially for parents looking to keep their kids from seeing the bad language and hate speech spewed by Internet trolls. Frankly, I'm not a fan of all that stuff, either, so Shut Up has earned a permanent home on my iDevices.

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