If you're not watching every match live, this tournament is a minefield. Push notifications, group chats, Twitter trends, Reddit threads, and even your phone's own news widget are all racing to tell you the score before you've had a chance to watch the replay. One glance at the wrong tab and the result is spoiled — no rewind button for that.
Muting a few accounts or turning off notifications for one app doesn't cut it. Scores leak from everywhere. Here's how to actually seal the leaks.
Where World Cup Spoilers Actually Come From
| Source | Turning off notifications | ElementHider |
|---|---|---|
| Push notifications from news apps | ✓ | ✓ |
| Twitter / X trending sidebar | ✗ | ✓ |
| Reddit post titles & thumbnails | ✗ | ✓ |
| YouTube video titles & thumbnails | ✗ | ✓ |
| News homepage headlines | ✗ | ✓ |
| Search engine score widgets | ✗ | ✓ (with a selector rule) |
The pattern is the same everywhere: the result is written directly into the headline, the thumbnail, or the trending topic — not tucked away where a notification toggle can catch it. The only reliable fix is filtering the page content itself, before it renders.
Setting Up ElementHider for Match Days
Add the teams and rounds you're avoiding
Open the popup and add the team names, plus common result shorthand: Argentina France Quarter-final FT full-time beat defeat
Use Blur instead of Hide on news sites
Hide removes the element completely — good for feeds. Blur is often better for headlines, since you still see that a story exists without reading the score. Turn on hover-to-reveal if you want the option to peek once you're sure you're ready.
Kill the score widgets with point-and-click
Google's own search results and most news homepages show a live score box that bypasses keyword matching entirely, since it doesn't always contain the team name in text you'd think to filter. Use ElementHider's point-and-click selector mode to click the widget directly — it creates a CSS-selector rule that removes it everywhere, every visit.
Common Match-Day Scenarios
Recording a match to watch after work
Add every team playing that day, not just the ones you care about — a headline like "Underdogs stun favorites in extra time" is just as spoiling if you don't yet know who was playing. If you have the Supporter Pack's Groups feature, bundle the whole tournament into one World Cup group so you can flip it off in one click the moment you've caught up.
Following the tournament, but not every match
Add just the specific matches or players you're behind on, and use "This site only" to scope a keyword to one site — useful when a team name means something unrelated elsewhere.
Avoiding the group chat screenshot problem
Someone always forwards a screenshot of the final score into a group chat, which then gets reposted onto Reddit or X with the same caption every time. Generic keywords like final score FT: 92' catch a surprising number of these reposts, since spoiler captions tend to follow the same few formats.
Tip: Supporter Pack users can use a Regexp rule like \b(FT|HT)\b.*\d+\s*-\s*\d+ to catch scoreline shorthand ("FT 2-1", "HT 0-0") in one rule, instead of listing every possible score by hand.
The Bottom Line
Notification settings only stop the messages your phone chooses to show you — they do nothing about the headline you scroll past on a news site, the thumbnail in your YouTube subscriptions, or the trending topic sitting at the top of your timeline. Filtering the page itself, before it's rendered, is the only approach that covers all of it. Set your keywords once before kickoff, and you can browse normally until you're ready to watch.