Dark modes have been rolling out across various social media platforms over the past 18 months or so. Dark mode is popular as it can be a lot easier on your eyes, especially if you need to look at a screen for a number of hours at a time and if using a smartphone or desktop at night. Artificial light has been shown to suppress the sleep-inducing hormone, melatonin, which could disrupt your sleep patterns, so if you must use a smartphone before bedtime, dark mode is a good idea.
Rather than leave you in the dark, we thought we would collate the instructions of how to activate dark mode on the popular social platforms.
Twitter – Desktop
You can toggle dark mode on and off by clicking on your profile icon in the top right-hand corner and scrolling down and clicking ‘Dark Mode’.
Dark mode off
Dark mode on
Twitter – Mobile
On a mobile device, you have a couple more additional options available. To access Dark Mode click on your profile image in the top left-hand corner to open the pop-out menu. Scroll down and click ‘settings and privacy’.
Under the General options click on ‘Display and sound’
You should be able to see ‘Dark Mode’.
When you toggle Dark Mode on, you’ll see a couple of further options appear. Dim– makes the background a charcoal colour. Lights out – turns the background black.
You’ll also see another option ‘Automatic dark mode’. Toggle this on to automatically turn dark mode on in the evening and off in the morning.
Messenger
Messenger has recently introduced dark mode to its platform. To activate it you need to send someone (or yourself) a crescent moon emoji. After you have been notified that you have discovered dark mode, you will be able to toggle dark mode on in the settings.
YouTube – Desktop
Google added a dark mode to YouTube on desktops in 2017 and rolled it out to mobile devices in late 2018.
To turn on dark mode on desktop, you access the settings menu by clicking on your profile image in the top right-hand corner.
You then scroll down and click ‘Dark Theme’ – here you will see a brief description of dark theme and you can switch it on.
YouTube – Mobile
On mobile, you click your profile image in the top right-hand corner to open your account details. Scroll down and click ‘Settings’. You can then toggle ‘Dark theme’ on and off.
Night mode is currently only available when accessing Pinterest through a mobile browser. At the time of publishing this post, night mode was not available on desktop or mobile app.
To turn on night mode you need to be on your profile page so you can access your settings by clicking the nut icon in the top right-hand corner. You then click ‘Edit settings’. Scroll down and you should see ‘Enable night mode’, where you can toggle it on and off.
We anticipate that other social media channels will eventually add dark mode to their platforms. Do you use dark mode on social media? Do let us know in the comments below.