Social media platform, Twitter, confirmed on Wednesday that it recently tested a feature that suggests accounts you might wish to unfollow.
In a statement to an independent journalist, the site’s representative stated: ”We know people want a relevant Twitter timeline. One way to do this is by unfollowing people they don’t engage with regularly.”
Twitter insists the feature isn’t meant to pass judgement on the worth of anyone’s account but rather it’s meant to prune your follow list by bringing into attention people you don’t interact with often.
The test seems like Twitter’s attempt at boosting engagement and user satisfaction by using software to personalize their feeds.
top people I should apparently unfollow? Thanks, twitter... pic.twitter.com/Uiyn5kApTS
Other features namely “In Case You Missed It” and the timeline ranking algorithm have helped revive the company’s engagement information measures over the past year.
The suggested unfollow feature, which is arrived at by a formula applied by the platform, gives you control over whose tweets you see less of based on your behaviour and interactions on the site.
It also takes care of the phenomenon where people’s follow lists grow unmanageably long owing to being presented with new interesting people to follow.
As such, this feature allows you to unfollow people you rarely interact with so as to create space to follow new people one takes interest in.
Twitter is now suggesting accounts to UNFOLLOW!
h/t @medavep who got told to unfollow me! pic.twitter.com/PNaY7aQ9i0
During the test run, Twitter rolled out the feature using the prompt “Control What’s Happening Here.”
It was suggested by those who saw the feature that the headline sounded rather harsh and that upon rolling it out, they should probably use different words for the same.
