How to mass unfollow on X (Twitter) without getting suspended

No. X's Help Center describes one way to unfollow on the web: hover over the Following button next to an account, it turns red and says Unfollow, and you click it. In the app, you tap the Following button next to each name in your Following list. One account per tap or click: no page of the Help Center offers to select several.

So anything that unfollows many accounts at once is a tool: an app you connect to your account, or a browser extension or script that clicks Unfollow for you in your logged-in X tab. X's rules cover both, and with both, the account at risk is yours.

Three of X's rule pages speak to it, and none gives a number:

• The automation rules, updated in April 2026: "You may not follow or unfollow X accounts in a bulk, aggressive, or indiscriminate manner." They also forbid "scripting the X website", which "may result in the permanent suspension of your account", and hold you responsible for what an app connected to your account does.
• The authenticity policy bans "indiscriminate following": "following and/or unfollowing a large number of unrelated accounts in a short time period, particularly by automated means". It also bans "follow churn", following and then unfollowing large numbers of accounts to inflate your own follower count.
• The search rules list aggressively following and unfollowing people among the behaviours for which X may remove an account from search, or in some cases suspend it.

By hand isn't exempt: the authenticity policy says "particularly" by automated means, not only. Automation is what the rules aim at, though. And follow churn means following and unfollowing to inflate your own follower count, which clearing out old follows doesn't do.

Twitter did once put a figure on it. From 2009 until at least 2018, its help pages on following said that "if you don't follow or unfollow hundreds of accounts in a single day, and you aren't using automated methods of following accounts, you should be fine." That sentence is on none of X's current pages, and nothing has replaced it.

X's page on locked and limited accounts describes the first step. When X sees what it calls aggressive following, it limits the account's features "for a specified time, which varies based on the nature of the violation", and offers two ways out: use X in that limited state until the time is up, or verify a phone number or email address.

While an account is limited, X says its posts may be filtered out of places such as search results and notifications. If the activity looked automated, X may also lock the account until you pass a captcha.

Repeat violations can lead to permanent suspension, the same page says. The authenticity policy adds that a first offence can mean anything from deleting posts to a temporary lock, and that "for severe violations, accounts will be permanently suspended at first detection." X doesn't say where unfollowing turns severe.

Twitter's rules have forbidden automated unfollowing since at least 2009, and the apps that offered it were cut off one after another:

The apps that still can follow or unfollow for you need your "express and informed consent" first, according to X's developer policy, and the same policy forbids bulk actions. Browser extensions and console scripts that unfollow in bulk are still around. They work in your logged-in X tab and click for you, which as we read X's rules is scripting the X website, and the account doing the clicking is yours. In February 2026, X's head of product, Nikita Bier, wrote that X was rolling out more detection for automation, and that if "a human is not tapping on the screen", the account would likely be suspended.

The suspensions for mass unfollowing we found in the press were of apps, not of the people who used them. Twitter did warn developers in 2017 that aggressive following could get "both an application and associated Twitter accounts" suspended. Before you connect anything, see what a tracker should never ask you for.

1. 1

   Make the list first

   Decide who goes before you start. Our "Not following back" list shows the accounts you follow that don't follow you, the ones with the most followers first. On Free it compares up to 4,000 accounts you follow, and on Kong ($7.99/mo), up to 10,000.

2. 2

   Unfollow on X

   Each row of the list links to the account's profile on X, where you press Following, then Unfollow. We have no unfollow button, and we never unfollow anyone from your account.

3. 3

   Spread it out

   Do a batch a day rather than the whole list in one sitting.

By hand takes a while. In January 2014, Charlie Warzel of BuzzFeed News unfollowed 1,838 accounts in nearly three and a half hours.

Who you unfollow changes what happens next. An account that doesn't follow you can't unfollow you back, so clearing those out costs you no followers. Mutuals are another matter. When Robert Scoble unfollowed all 106,000 accounts he followed on 3 August 2009, more than 7,000 unfollowed him back within two days, most of them bots, he guessed. When Anil Dash unfollowed more than 5,000 in July 2018, about 100 people seemed to unfollow him back, which he said might just be a normal week.