Twitter tests unfollow suggestions
Twitter ran tests on a few accounts that people don’t engage with to see if they wanted to unfollow them. Some users whos account the prompt was tested on found the suggestion Twitter was making to be negative or offensive.
The prompt that was tested stated “You don’t need to follow everyone to know what’s happening. Make sure you’re only following the people that make Twitter great for you.” This statement doesn’t exactly match up with the companies reasoning for testing this feature saying, “We know that people want a relevant Twitter timeline. One way to do this is by unfollowing people they don’t engage with regularly.”
The intention behind this feature was meant for good use, however the execution of it was not true to the reasoning of why Twitter wanted to implement it.
If Twitter revises this feature and executes it in a proper way this could be harmful to businesses. Companies will have to make efforts towards engaging with consumers to try to keep their following up.
On the contrary, this could be beneficial in detecting bots, fake news sources, and spam accounts. Even though some of these accounts are designed to engage with users, some of them go by quietly undetected.
Clearly there are still kinks to work out in the feature, and hopefully Twitter recognizes this. Perhaps next time Twitter can suggest unfollowing people that aren’t influential authors, politicians, and journalists.
Find the Mashable article here: https://mashable.com/article/twitter-unfollow-suggestions-button/#oMqNj75CXiqX