Unfollowing, Blocking, and Reporting for Spam on Twitter

Unfollowing, Blocking, and Reporting for Spam

If you don’t want a particular person to follow you — perhaps because you don’t want to be associated with them, or they’re a little creepy — you can block them. Blocking’s a bit drastic. Perhaps you just don’t want to see their tweets anymore. You may just want to unfollow them. To unfollow a user, go to your main Twitter page and click the “Following” link and select “View as a List of People.” This brings you to a list of the people you are following.

Figure 49 — Unfollowing People on Twitter

Find the person you want to unfollow, and click the Follow button to unfollow them. You can also use the dropdown to see various actions you can take, including mentioning, adding to a list, blocking, and reporting them.

If you really want to block the person from following you, you can select “Block.” The block takes immediate effect, although you’ll see an Undo link in the listing if you change your mind. You can also block a user by visiting their Twitter page and clicking “Block.”

Twitter doesn’t notify the blocked user, although they may notice they no longer can view your tweets in their timeline, but they will be able to view them on your public profile page. The main benefit is that they can no longer direct message you (we discuss direct messaging in the next section.) If the blocked user tries to follow your tweets again, Twitter displays a message similar to the following figure.

Figure 50 — Twitter Blocked User Message

You may also want to report users for spamming. This is a good idea if, for example, you and another user are mutually following each other, and they start direct messaging spam to your account.

Here’s what Twitter considers to be spamming behavior:

• Posting harmful links (including links to phishing or malware sites)
• Abusing the @reply function to post unwanted messages to users
• Creating lots of accounts or using automated tools to create multiple accounts
• Spamming trending topics to try to grab attention
• Repeatedly posting duplicate updates
• Posting links with unrelated tweets
• Aggressive following behavior (for instance, mass following and un-following in order to gain attention)

To report this type of abuse, select Report for Spam either in your list of followers or on the user’s Twitter page. Reporting a user blocks them from following you and flags them for Twitter to review. A single report is not likely to cause Twitter to take action against the accused spammer. Here’s Twitter’s current statement about reporting spammers:

Twitter’s Trust and Safety Team looks at user reports of spam in combination with other signals for spam investigation. You may not immediately or definitely see this account suspended. Once you’ve reported an account as spam, it is no longer able to follow you or reply to you.