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Ask HN: 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.)
- slater 6y agoProof?
- erichocean 6y agoI've personally had to refollow people, and I've seen many many many people comment they've had to do the same.
- max_hammer 6y ago>A few days later, when the owner of the handle reactivated the True Indology handle, the person received a rude shock to see a negligible fraction of the over quarter of a million followers that the handle had earlier. Twitter claims that it takes a maximum of 48 hours to restore all the followers. However, even after over 70 hours, when I checked the account, it still had negligible followers. What was even more interesting is that if anyone tried to follow True Indology, the person would be automatically made to unfollow the handle. So essentially, Twitter was actively stopping people from following True Indology, while all that while, allowing the fake “True Indology” account to exist, and get followers who thought they were following the real True Indology. [Source](https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/opinion-the-curious-case-of-true-indology-and-other-tweets/362001 https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/opinion-the-curio...)
- knaq 6y agoThe whole point is to hurt engagement. You've clearly followed somebody that Twitter does not approve of.
- msantos 6y agoIf 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?
- erichocean 6y agoBy far the best hypothesis yet!
- petercooper 6y agoI'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.