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Twitter users complain about seeing tweets from accounts they don’t follow

Earlier this year, Twitter released an update that forced users to see the “For You” tab with suggested tweets every time they opened the app. The platform later reversed this decision, but it seems that Twitter is once again finding a way to annoy its users. This time, many people are complaining about Twitter’s For You tab excessively showing content from accounts they don’t follow.

Twitter is showing a bunch of tweets from unknown accounts

As reported by many Twitter users on Thursday, the For You tab is now showing a bunch of tweets from accounts they don’t follow. In most cases, these tweets are unrelated to other accounts or content that the user follows. I could even see this problem for myself when opening the Twitter app today.

While the Following tab shows tweets from accounts you follow in chronological order, the For You tab uses algorithms to show tweets that are considered most relevant to you first. In some cases, tweets from accounts you don’t follow also appear in the For You tab, but these are usually related to topics you interact with the most on the social network.

Looking at my For You tab now, there are very few tweets from my friends and other accounts that I follow, and there are a lot of tweets from unknown accounts. Some of these accounts being promoted for no reason are subscribed to Twitter Blue.

Top comment by Aiden

Liked by 3 people

This happened before Musk. I am slightly right-of-center politically, and was often bombarded by far-left Twitter accounts on my feed. I do like to read other points of view, but it seemed extreme at times, considering I didn’t follow those accounts and in the cases of crazy-people would select whatever option there was to see less posts like that (I don’t remember the exact wording, I haven’t used Twitter in a while now). Lo and behold, more like them would appear and sometimes the people I had rejected would return.

Twitter was a dumpster fire before Musk.

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It’s unclear at this point whether Twitter is facing another internal issue or whether the company has decided to change how its algorithm works in a more aggressive way. Earlier this week, Twitter rolled out a change to its API that prevented users from opening links, images, and even accessing the social network through its website.

There’s something going on at Twitter

Since Elon Musk became the owner of Twitter, he has fired key engineers from the platform, which is now repeatedly facing sudden outages. Musk has also been pushing the Twitter Blue subscription by restricting access to previously free features and even asking employees to force his own tweets to show up for all Twitter users, even people who don’t follow him.

As noted by 9to5Mac, new Twitter users are now flooded with random content on their timeline, even when they don’t follow anyone yet. Interestingly, Musk’s account is first on the list of suggested accounts to follow.

We would try to reach out to Twitter in order to find out what’s going on, but the company no longer has a PR team.

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Avatar for Filipe Espósito Filipe Espósito

Filipe Espósito is a Brazilian tech Journalist who started covering Apple news on iHelp BR with some exclusive scoops — including the reveal of the new Apple Watch Series 5 models in titanium and ceramic. He joined 9to5Mac to share even more tech news around the world.