- Twitter is testing a new feature that lets you remove followers discreetly.
- Users previously had to block accounts to remove followers.
- The announcement is the first feature in a list of changes planned by Twitter to move toward "social privacy."
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Twitter is now testing a feature that lets users remove followers discreetly without having to block them, the company's support branch announced on Tuesday evening.
The announcement is the first in a slate of changes planned by the social media platform to promote what it calls "social privacy," Bloomberg reported. The aim is to give users more control over their reputations and identities.
Under the new feature, Twitter users can go to their profile and manually take other accounts off their followers' list by clicking on the three-dot icon, which will display an option to remove that specific follower.
-Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 7, 2021
Before this change, Twitter users could only remove followers by blocking them, preventing the other user from sending them a direct message or viewing their tweets.
In order to make it less obvious that a person has been blocked, some users do what's called a "soft block." As Insider's Dave Johnson explained, soft blocking is when you block and then quickly unblock a follower.
"Blocking forces the other person to unfollow you and erases your direct message history, but because you then unblock the person, they can still see your tweets, so they don't appear to be blocked. It gives the impression that they unfollowed you by accident, or perhaps due to a glitch on Twitter," he wrote.
Twitter is planning to add more privacy features to its services, like letting users archive their tweets after a set amount of time, hide tweets that they've liked, and removing tweet mentions of themselves, according to Bloomberg.
Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
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