Culture

How to unfollow Ashton Kutcher

As a service to you, Rafe Needleman discovers how to unfollow the un-unfollowable.

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large

Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.

See full bio

Rafe Needleman

April 17, 2009 11:36 a.m. PT

2 min read

Updated at 11:15 AM with reports from users. See end of story.

Twitter is getting fishy. In the race between Ashton Kutcher (aplusk on Twitter) and the CNN Breaking News feed (CNNbrk) to get to 1 million followers first, Kutcher won. But was the race goosed by Twitter itself?

Can't unfollow Kutcher? Don't give up... Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET

Last night, various reports surfaced (see TechCrunch, for example) that while people could follow Kutcher and CNNbrk, they couldn't unfollow them.

But the real issue is this: The people of the world need a way to unfollow Kutcher, or whomever else they want to. The standard way of doing it, going to a Twitter user's update page, and pressing the "remove" button under the "Following" notification, doesn't work for the aplusk or CNNbrk accounts. You'll get an error.

This works. So long, Ashton! Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET

But here's how to get around that: Simply enter the update "off aplusk" or "off CNNbrk" in your Twitter status entry box, or in any Twitter client. This is the reverse of the command to follow someone, "f [name]." I confirmed that it works. I was listening to Kutcher before, and now I'm not.

The world is saved.

Update at 11:15 a.m. PDT: Reports are coming in that this method for unfollowing is not working reliably. My latest report: After following aplusk anew, I tried it once more and it didn't appear to work at first, but after a few minutes I confirmed that I had in fact unfollowed aplusk again. Also, I tried following and unfollowing aplusk directly from his own page, and that also worked, but I tried it again and got the old error message. Feel free to report your experiences in the comments below.