HACKER Q&A
📣 erichocean

Why does Twitter unfollow people without their consent?


Does anyone know why Twitter does this? It seems like it would hurt engagement, but maybe I'm missing something here…

(By "unfollow", I mean you follow some account and then later, without asking, Twitter "unfollows" that account. So you have to go back in manually and click the Follow button again to get their tweets to show up in your timeline.)


  👤 msantos Accepted Answer ✓
If the person that you followed blocks and then unblock you, you are removed from their followers list.

Could that be the case in your instance?


👤 petercooper
I've been using Twitter heavily for 14 years and have experienced this (only) several times for sure. While there is the possibility of being "soft blocked" I've always chalked it up to poor data integrity at Twitter's end given how I'd heard things were allegedly rigged up in the earlier days.

👤 knaq
The whole point is to hurt engagement. You've clearly followed somebody that Twitter does not approve of.

👤 slater
Proof?