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The social media giant is trialling a feature that will stop another user from following you without alerting or blocking them.
Twitter is testing a new ‘soft block’ feature, according to tweets from its support account. Soon, users may be able to remove people from their list of followers in a few simple clicks, without needing to completely block them.
Currently, the only option to remove someone who is following you is to block them, which stops them from viewing your tweets or directly messaging you. It also stops you from messaging them.
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
If you don’t want to completely seal off access, you can then unblock the person. This stops your content from appearing in their feed without directly alerting them, but they’ll see that they are no longer following you if they click onto your profile. If you have set your account to private, they will need to request permission to follow you again.
With this new feature, Twitter is seemingly letting you achieve a similar effect without all of the effort. The Twitter Support account said that it is testing this feature on the web and that all that anyone using the feature would need to do is go into their list of followers, find the person they intend to remove and click the three dots beside their name. A ‘Remove this follower’ button will appear and, with a click, they’re gone.
They still won’t be notified and they will be able to follow you again, as long as your account is not set to private.
This new feature would add to a user’s control over interactions on the website – an area that Twitter has been tweaking of late. Last week, the social media company announced its Safety Mode feature, which will temporarily block accounts that it deems to be sending offensive, hurtful or repetitive messages. This setting is also in a testing phase.
This is part of Twitter’s broader efforts to tackle online harassment. At the UN Generation Equality Forum in Paris at the start of July, Twitter and other social networks said they would commit to implementing safety measures preventing the abuse of women and girls who use their platforms.
While the social media giant is busy trying to live up to these promises, it is also getting grief for changes in its user interface. It previously announced that 2021 would be a year of research and development, with tweaks and new features being introduced, trialled and removed across the board – including its short-lived Fleets feature.
