Twitter is the perfect social media platform for anyone who misses simple status updates from the old Facebook days. You can share pictures and your thoughts on everything while keeping up with your friends and favorite celebrities at the same time.
If you’re a new Twitter user or just a casual user, you may not be familiar with many Twitter-specific terms. Similar to other social media platforms, Twitter offers the ability to block certain users. However, there are two ways to do so: hard blocking and soft blocking. Here, we’ll look at how these two methods differ.
What Is a Hard Block on Twitter?
A ‘hard block’ is typically synonymous with the word ‘block’ on Twitter. When you completely block someone, they can’t see your tweets anymore unless you purposefully unblock them. The user won’t get a notification that you blocked them.
To block a Twitter user, You need to go to their profile and click on the three vertical dots at the top-right corner. Once you choose Block from the context menu, they won’t see your tweets until you repeat this step and select Unblock.
People can, of course, view your tweets while they’re logged out of Twitter or even create a new account with the sole purpose of following your account. Hard blocking people you know can hurt their feelings. Or if you block someone who’s being pesky or disrespectful, they can become angrier and even more of a pest when they realize it.
This is where soft blocking comes in handy. You can unclutter your Twitter feed without offending the people you want to block.
What Is a Soft Block on Twitter?
For random strangers, hard blocking is usually your best bet. But what about people you know in real life that you don’t want to interact with your content anymore? Well, a soft block is your answer.
To soft block someone on Twitter, you’d follow the same instructions as above to block them but go through the process of unblocking them as well. So, head to the person’s profile, click on the three vertical dots in the top right corner, select Block, then repeat the step and choose Unblock.
Doing this forces the person to unfollow you, meaning they will no longer see your tweets on their timeline and hopefully won’t interact with you as much. The soft block technique doesn’t prevent the person from visiting your profile and seeing all your public tweets. They can even refollow you if they recognize that they’re no longer following you.
The biggest perk of soft blocking someone is that they’ll probably think that Twitter glitched and unfollowed you for some reason. As soft blocking becomes a more common practice, people might start assuming they were soft blocked, but there’s no way to know for sure.
After recognizing the popularity of soft blocking people as opposed to full-on blocking people, Twitter added this as a feature on the web browser version of the platform. So, if you’re on a web browser, you can go to your list of followers, find the person you don’t want as a follower, and click on the three horizontal dots next to their name. You should see an option that reads Remove this follower.
Completing this process forces the person to unfollow you, but they won’t see a notification letting them know you did this, and they can still view your tweets if they go to your profile, provided your tweets are public. Just like traditional soft blocking, the user can follow you again, but it will at least temporarily remove them as a follower.
Learn All the Twitter Lingo
Twitter constantly has new users joining the social media platform, from younger people who use the platform for memes and viral content to older people who want the latest news. And for the most part, Twitter lets you personalize the platform to your liking, whether it’s who to follow, what topics you want to see on your timeline, or which words and hashtags you want to mute.
However, new users have to tackle the steep learning curve of deciphering unique Twitter lingo and figuring out how to use the platform. Luckily, Twitter is a fairly intuitive platform and an excellent choice for both skilled and beginner social media users.
