California: Social micro-blogging site Twitter has started testing a new feature that suggests which accounts people might want to unfollow. This comes after a decade of recommending accounts for users to follow.
A few Twitter users reported a notification from the social media firm offering the chance to “control what’s happening” on their news feed.
“You don’t need to follow everyone to know what's happening,” one notification read. “Make sure you’re only following the people that make Twitter great for you.”
Another message stated: “You can improve your timeline by reviewing some accounts you may not need to follow.”
Twitter confirmed that it had tested the feature in a trial among a small proportion of users.
“We know that people want a relevant Twitter timeline. One way to do this is by unfollowing people they don't engage with regularly,” a spokesperson said. “We ran a limited test to surface accounts that people were not engaging with to check if they’d like to unfollow.”
The trial is part of Twitter’s plans to boost user engagement by removing accounts that its algorithm deems irrelevant to certain people.
It follows the introduction of the “algorithmic timeline” and an “in case you missed it” feature in, Twitter. closer in line with other social media platforms like Facebook.
Other recent measures to improve user experience include a major purge of accounts controlled by bots.Tens of millions of suspicious and inactive accounts were removed as part of the cull, which came after the firm came under pressure to be more active in policing the platform.
