New Delhi: US-based social media giant Twitter has rolled out a new feature for its users — remove the followers you don’t want, without notifying them.
The new feature was made available to users worldwide starting Tuesday. However, the feature isn’t immediately available on the Twitter mobile app, and can only be accessed on the web version.
We're making it easier to be the curator of your own followers list. Now testing on web: remove a follower without blocking them.
To remove a follower, go to your profile and click “Followers”, then click the three dot icon and select “Remove this follower”. pic.twitter.com/2Ig7Mp8Tnx
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 7, 2021
So far, Twitter provided you no option to remove followers from your list without the follower’s knowledge. The only way to get rid of unwanted followers was to block them permanently. There was also little that could be done about the followers list.
With this new feature, you can now have more control and “be the curator of your own followers list”.
Tech news website The Verge called the feature a ‘soft block’. It yields some of the results that the traditional blocking feature does, but without hurting a user’s feelings that they have been ‘blocked’. The ‘blocking’ feature lets the follower who has been blocked know when they try to visit your Twitter profile.
Unlike blocking, simply removing a follower would allow them to still see your tweets, and even to directly message you. However, your tweets won’t appear on their timeline.
The downside of the new feature is that a user can follow you again if they want to.
New features on the app
Twitter has been introducing features to keep users safe and limit “unwelcome interactions”.
On 1 September, the platform said it was starting to test something called ‘Safety Mode’.
With this mode turned on, Twitter will automatically block accounts for seven days if its systems find the account has used “insults or hateful remarks” or has repeatedly responded to tweets without being invited to do so.
“Our systems will assess the likelihood of a negative engagement by considering both the Tweet’s content and the relationship between the Tweet author and replier. Our technology takes existing relationships into account, so accounts you follow or frequently interact with will not be autoblocked,” Twitter said about the feature.
(Edited by Amit Upadhyaya)
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