We are all accustomed to “People you may know” lists on all social media networks, especially the likes of Facebook who are creepily accurate with it. Well, in a never-been-seen-before move, over the past few days Twitter has been secretly testing a “People you may need to unfollow” list.
This feature was spotted by David Pearce, who got a suggested list of accounts he may need to unfollow in order to improve his timeline.
Twitter is encouraging me unfollow people. It even suggested a few accounts, like @MattNavarra! pic.twitter.com/ljyXctAivQ
— David Pearce (@medavep) August 29, 2018
According to Twitter, they are working on improving user’s experience on Twitter by suggesting ways to make their timelines relevant to them, this entails suggesting they unfollow acounts that they don’t engage with.
“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,” read a statement released by the company following the discovery of “People you may need to unfollow” list.
Recently, Twitter’s founders spoke out saying that they were rethinking how Twitter works. This new feature could be part of it but since Twitter did not give any information on whether the tests were positive or negative, we may never see it materialize.