We last week reported that Twitter is working on several new privacy tools to make its microblogging platform safer for everyone. The company has now started testing the first of those tools: the ability to remove followers without blocking them. This new feature is available to some users on the web version of Twitter. If everything goes well, it could roll out to more users globally in the coming weeks or months.
To remove a follower, you have to navigate to your Followers list on your profile. There you’ll see a new ellipsis button (three horizontal dots) beside the follow/following button against each follower’s name. Click on this ellipsis button and select “Remove this follower” to remove them. Twitter will not notify the user of this action.
The followers you have removed will no longer see your tweets on their timeline. However, they can still visit your profile to see all your tweets, unless you’ve set your account to “private”. More importantly, they can follow you again anytime, or perhaps send you message requests. Blocking the person prevents them from all this. But that also means you won’t be able to see their tweets, follow them, or send messages. The remove option, meanwhile, acts as a “soft block” where the person will not be able to automatically see or react to your tweets.
You can already “soft block” a follower on Twitter by manually blocking and unblocking them. In fact, the company is adding the new remove option after seeing users use this approach. It now wants to make things easier. Twitter says this feature will allow you “to be the curator of your own Followers list.”
This feature could be more useful to users who have set their account to “private”. They will be able to remove a follower they have mistakenly approved.
More new privacy tools are coming to Twitter soon
As said earlier, Twitter also has a few more new privacy tools in the works. Among other things, the company plans to let users un-mention themselves from a conversation. This feature could go live by the end of this year.
Twitter will also let you hide your likes from the public. Lastly, the company is working on the ability to automatically archive older tweets after a set time. We will let you know as and when these upcoming Twitter features go live for users. You can expect the remove option to be available pretty soon.