Twitter’s next trick: ‘removing’ followers without blocking them

We all know this feeling. We met someone at an event or a party, and had to follow them on Twitter because of social pressure. And there’s no polite way to remove them from your Followers and Following lists, apart from sneakily soft blocking them (first blocking them and then unblocking them).

However, Twitter is now testing a feature that will let you remove a follower from your list. This will boot them out of your followers list without blocking, and preventing them from seeing your tweets at all. To do that, go to your Followers list from your profile, click on the three-dot icon, and select “Remove this follower.”

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

Currently, this feature is only available on the web in the test phase. So you’ll have to wait if you want to try this out on your phone.

This is another one of Twitter’s tests to give you granular control over your profile and tweets. In June, it started experimenting with a feature that will let you untag yourself from a conversation.

Over the last few months, a bunch of Twitter designers have been tweeting about concepts such as tweeting to close friends, so that you have more control over who you’re tweeting to.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Twitter is also working on a bunch of features under “social privacy,” including finding archived tweets after a certain period, and hiding tweets that you liked.