Anybody who is a social media connoisseur will tell you that following and then unfollowing people is the best way to accumulate fans. The method works like this: you follow someone, and they follow you back. Then, you unfollow them, which keeps your numbers looking nice. Recently, Twitter decided to test out a method that would suggest who you should unfollow.
A Twitter representative spoke with Slate, and stated, “We know that people want a relevant Twitter timeline. One way to do this is by unfollowing people they don’t engage with regularly. We ran an incredibly limited test to surface accounts that people were not engaging with to check if they’d like to unfollow them.” The test only ran for a few days, and has already concluded. The feature was only available to a limited number of Twitter users, who reposted screenshots of the unfollow suggestions.
The unfollow suggestions do not attempt to find accounts that Twitter has biasedly targeted. Instead, the algorithms seek to find pages that users interact with the least, or accounts that have grown stagnant. Conservative figures, with Donald Trump leading the charge, have been blaming social media sites and search engines for stifling right-winged pages. Although the unfollow feature was only a test, and there has been no announcement for a rollout, this will undoubtedly be used as an argument by conservatives.