Removing Twitter followers

Did you know that it’s possible to remove someone from your followers without blocking them?

Normally when you visit your list of followers these are the options available to you:

But after you protect your twitter account and mark it private, the options change to include the remove option:

Selecting “Remove” shows this alert and after you click OK, poof that user is no longer following you:

This nifty option is also available from the API, though it is undocumented:

curl -u user:password -d ” http://twitter.com/friendships/destroy/59648642.xml

Here is a patch to John Nunemaker’s Twitter gem that adds this functionality:

module Twitter
  class Base
    def friendship_remove(id)
      perform_post(“/friendships/remove/#{id}.xml”)
    end
  end

And here is a quick Ruby Script that removes all the followers of a user:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -rubygems
require ‘twitter’

module Twitter
  class Base
    def friendship_remove(id)
      perform_post(“/friendships/remove/#{id}.xml”)
    end
  end

auth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new(‘user’, ‘password’)
twitter = Twitter::Base.new(auth)

twitter.follower_ids.each do |follower_id|
  begin
    twitter.friendship_remove(follower_id)
  rescue => err
    puts “#{err} for follower #{follower_id}”
    next
  end
end