How to Remove Followers on Twitter/X - 3 Main Methods
Removing a follower, blocking, and the soft block that drops someone without telling them. When each one is the right move.
Remove a Follower Directly
Firstly Go to Your profile and tap on Followers count. Locate the account you wish to delete, tap the overflow menu next to it and select Remove this follower. X tells the person you removed them? No. If your account is public, they will still be able to see your posts and can follow you again unless you take an extra step. It's better to use this way if you want to clean up a single or maybe two accounts in silence but not cut the relationship entirely. Once you delete a follower, that person is gone from your list, and unless they check your followers manually there is no way for them to even know.
The simplest of three methods is direct remove, which requires just two taps and produces no trace. It showed up on X in 2021; prior to that, the only way to remove a follower was to block and unblock them. This is the best option if you want to delete only a few accounts. The other methods on this list are more useful for larger cleanups as they either block the person from coming back or allow you to deal with multiple accounts.
Soft Block a Follower
Just block (and unblock) the account. The block breaks the follow relationship, and the unblock releases the block but does not restore the follow. It is the same as removing them directly, neither send a notification. If they go to your profile, an observant person will see that there is a Follow button instead of the Following button. The following is the method that existed before X added the remove option and still works today in exactly the same way.
Soft blocking is helpful to remove someone from following you when the option of removing them or some other reason for not using it is available, and also if you are trying to test out third-party apps which only allow for a block/unblock feature. The only downside is that you have an extra step of having to unblock, which adds approximately two seconds for each account. For bulk removal of more than a few followers, the direct remove method is quicker. A side-effect Soft blocking has is that it hides your posts from the affected person by soft blocking them for a very short amount of time (usually not enough to make a difference).
Block and Leave It
The permanent block prevents the person from following you again, hides your posts for them when they are signed in, and prevents them from sending you a message or mentioning you in a way that can be seen. It is not subtle. In your profile, everone sees is blocked as well and when anyone tries to view any posts of this account they see a message that says the account is unavailable. When the aim is to clear a list and not to halt contact, use a standing block. This is the most extreme option should only be used in a case of harassment or stalking, or when you honestly do not want that person communicating with you at all.
If the person is logged out or using a new account, they can still see your posts; blocking them has no effect. This only hides your content from the account you intended to block and they will still see all of your stuff while signed in. To stop an account from seeing your posts—completely—either make your account private or delete the posts. Blocking also prevents you from appearing in any quote tweets or retweets of your posts that the blocked person may have viewed. It is a bandaid, not a fix for already public content.
Clear Multiple Followers at Once
X does not have an option to bulk remove followers. You can either remove users one by one through the remove user feature or block each account individually via the blocking. Third-party apps that use the X API to mass unfollow users are in breach of X's terms and their accounts could be banned or suspended. The closest you get to a reset is securing your account and then refusing follow requests that are pending, which is not the case for previous followers. Whatever followers you get will be approved automatically, but if you then change to a protected account your existing followers remain approved.
If you want to truly start from scratch with an – empty follower list, each follower would have to be removed one by one. If you have several hundred followers or more, this is impractical. The more productive way to get engagement is to ask yourself what exactly you hate about the people following you, then solve that issue. If it's that specific persons are reading your posts then blocking them one by one is faster than removing all. That means that it would change nothing on a privacy front if the problem were too many bots or inactive accounts, since those accounts aren't reading your posts anyway.
Set Your Account to Protected Prisoner New Followers
Switch to protected mode and accept widespread requests to approve the entrance of latest followers. Anyone who didn't already follow you will have to request and wait for you to approve them. This is not an actual method to get rid of your followers, but avoids new, unwanted ones from slipping into the fold. Although, do note that protected accounts come with a second benefit as you will not only hide your photos from strangers but literally anyone who does not follow your account. This includes the general public and search engines also. You are exposed to a rash of unwanted followers, this gives you breathing room to think about what you want to do with the existing ones while your account is protected?
Setting your account to be private does not delete posts that are already public. Allegedly, some of your posts you made in public are still viewable in quote tweets, retweet archives and screenshot services. If you want to remove followers because people are reading your history that you would prefer did not (and most readers fall into this category) then an account protection only prevents access in the future. The posts themselves are still out there. Deleting of followers limits the audience circle, but it does not erase the content that this audience is reading.
Use TweetSweep to delete the posts themselves
However, unfollowing only limits who will see your upcoming posts. If what is really wrong is that people you do not want reading your past posts are reading them, there can be no more effective long-term remedy than deleting those posts from the record. TweetSweep is an app that deletes tweets and X posts based on a date range, keywords, or engagement level. Simply choose what you want to delete, specify the criteria and TweetSweep deletes in batches avoiding X's API limits. Gone from your timeline, gone from the search result and gone from any followers eye after the sweep. Not following the account that followed you does not erase their reading of your history as it has already been read.
Because X's total deletes API allows for 50 requests per 15 minutes per user, completely cleaning out a single user with roughly 3,200 posts takes many hours. TweetSweep handles the pacing automatically. The API ceiling prohibits deleting everything in one minute, but still allows you to delete everything - as long as the X's timeline sync returns posts, and that's limited to the last 3,200 posts. Your last 3,200 are available for view, if you have more than that. Remove Followers as well as Delete Posts Upgrade When you remove someone from your followers, she is no longer getting new eyes on future posts. Deleting posts deletes the history which newly existing followers can still see.