Photo: Sattalat Phukkum (Shutterstock)
Twitter is...something. Those of us who use it often find ourselves hopelessly addicted, scrolling through a sea of jokes, arguments, and many, many toxic accounts. If you find your followers list is full of the latter and you’re sick of them seeing your tweets in their feed, you’ll be happy to know that you can finally remove them quietly.
The difference between blocking and removing followers on Twitter
If someone on Twitter is rubbing you the wrong way, your best course of action until now has been to simply block them. Blocking accounts ensures that you won’t see another of their stupid jokes underneath your tweets, nor will you need to suffer through whatever DMs they might send your way. It’s a powerful—and occasionally satisfying—tool.
But blocking someone isn’t always a comfortable option. For one, it’s painfully obvious that you’re the one who blocked the account—if they try to check out your Twitter, they’ll see that infamous “this person blocked you” message. Sometimes that means an annoying person tweeting about you blocking them, or creating another account to try to interact with you again.
That’s where removing followers can sometimes be a better solution. If you don’t want someone actively viewing your tweets, but you don’t really want to cause a scene, removing them from your followers list is the way to go. Nobody is notified that you removed a follower, so it’s a silent event. And, if they happen to check your account and see they’re not following you anymore, there’s no proof that you were the one behind the removal. If they really want to, they can follow you again, but until then, you’re in the clear.
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How to remove followers on Twitter
Twitter announced the rollout of this feature on Monday, Oct. 11, through its Twitter Support account. In that tweet, the company confirmed that the only way to remove followers from your Twitter account is to do so from the web. It’s not clear why you aren’t able to remove followers from the app yet, but we can only assume that Twitter is working on implementing that functionality in the future as well.
To remove Twitter followers from the web, just head to your profile and click “Followers.” From here, click the three dots to the right of an account, then choose “Remove this follower.” That’s all there is to it, and you can rinse and repeat for any followers in this list. Once you remove a follower, however, they’re gone; if you want them back, you’ll need to ask. (Awkward.)
