Twitter might soon start suggesting people you should UNfollow, and it’s ice cold
By now, Twitter users know they can count on the site to recommend accounts they should follow. But what if the social media platform helped you take control of your feed in a different way? This could soon become a reality, because Twitter has reportedly been testing a new feature that would suggest people you should unfollow.
Slate reported yesterday, August 29th, that Twitter was testing a feature that will recommend the accounts you should cut ties with. This does admittedly sound helpful—it’s hard to clean out your timeline when you’re following hundreds of people. But how exactly will the platform decide who you shouldn’t follow any more?
A Twitter representative told Slate that during the test, accounts that users “were not engaging with” showed up as “unfollow” suggestions.
"We know that people want a relevant Twitter timeline. One way to do this is by unfollowing people they don’t engage with regularly," the representative said. "We ran an incredibly limited test to surface accounts that people were not engaging with to check if they’d like to unfollow them."
During the test, several users shared screenshots of what the feature looks like. Quartz senior reporter Tim Fernholz and social and digital media consultant Matt Navarra were among those who documented the test for the rest of us.
top people I should apparently unfollow? Thanks, twitter… pic.twitter.com/Uiyn5kApTS
— Tim Fernholz (@TimFernholz) August 29, 2018
Twitter is now suggesting accounts to UNFOLLOW!
h/t @medavep who got told to unfollow me! pic.twitter.com/PNaY7aQ9i0
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) August 29, 2018
This test was reportedly conducted over a few days and has now finished, but no word yet on when (or if) users will see the feature pop back up.
In recent months, Twitter has made efforts to crack down on trolls and fake accounts. In May, the company announced that, as part of a new harassment policy, it would begin filtering responses from accounts that exhibit trollish behavior. This latest potential update would be yet another way for the site to streamline user experience.
Unfollow suggestions might not be implemented for a while. Until then, we’ll have to do our unfollowing the old-fashioned way (11 p.m. after a glass of wine).