Twitter Has Been Recommending Profiles to Unfollow to Improve Engagement

Macayla Bricarell
Sep 2, 2018 · 2 min read
https://twitter.com/medavep

Today there are so many accounts to follow and receive content from on sites like Twitter and Instagram, making it difficult to see the content that actually matters to you. That’s where Twitter’s new unfollow suggestion comes in.

Traditionally, this media giant has suggested more and more accounts to follow, effectively causing our feeds to be simply too busy to see the content that we originally signed up for. By creating a suggested list of accounts to unfollow, Twitter is helping its audience to reclaim their internet experience and tailor the content they see back to what they actually routinely engage with. Twitter’s focus on media you are already interacting with and enjoying is extremely different to Instagram’s approach of recommending more accounts to follow based on your previous “likes” and that of your followers.

Twitter’s choice to promote accounts that produce the media you engage with the most only, or most common, accounts on your feed shows their preference for conversations between users. While this will help for maintaining user relationships and reducing “follow for follow” popularity, it might cause accounts that users do not normally reply to, think breaking news and celebrities, to be continuously on this “recommend to-remove” list. Twitter appears to still be working on the algorithm to decided what should be removed from one’s feed as the feature is still not available to most users.

Currently the unfollow suggestion list is not available to all users, the beta test with a handful of users was just completed with no defined broad rollout on the horizon.

Macayla Bricarell

Campaigning for lemonade settings on fridges since 2011

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