Twitter will now let you remove followers without blocking them
After testing last month, Twitter is rolling out a feature to all web users that will let them remove followers without blocking them. This safety feature can be helpful if you want to avoid the repercussions of blocking someone — if a blocked user navigates to your profile after you block them, Twitter will tell them that they were blocked. But by removing a follower, users can feel more secure about who sees their tweets without blocking them altogether.
Sure, the blocked user might notice that they no longer follow you, but who knows! Maybe they clicked the unfollow button on accident! There’s some plausible deniability there that a hard block doesn’t offer.
For years, Twitter users had manufactured this “soft block” by swiftly blocking and unblocking a follower, which removes them from your follower list. But now, Twitter is making this its own feature.
In the tweet about the test that Twitter posted in September, the images indicated that you have to manually scroll through your follower list and find the person you want to remove before you can take them off your followers list. But now, you can also remove a follower by going to their profile, clicking the three-dot icon, and selecting the “Remove this follower” option. For particularly popular Twitter users, that makes the feature far more usable.
Unrelated to follower removals, Twitter also announced a test of a feature that would allow users to swipe on their timeline between two different feeds: one that’s sorted by Twitter’s algorithm, and one that’s chronological.
techcrunch.com
