In a world…

This spring, one man battled against a Fortune-500 corporation. It sounds like a movie trailer, but in reality, these words describe a contest that happened entirely in the world of social networking. Ashton Kutcher, @aplusk on Twitter, competed against CNN in a race to one million followers. In the spirit of rooting for the underdog, I dutifully followed Kutcher’s account to help him reach the magic million before CNN.

It sounds like a lofty goal, a worthy struggle, when taken at face value. But then strange things started to happen. Bloggers began to report that they were unable to unfollow either Kutcher or CNN’s Twitter account. Apparently users were initially receiving error messages when trying to unfollow @aplusk’s account via the profile page. Several explanations were proposed. Could it be a conspiracy to bolster the numbers of followers? Perhaps a protection built-in by Twitter to prevent users from gaming the contest around Kutcher’s millionth follower? The criticism, however, appeared to die down shortly after both accounts surpassed a million followers.

Unfollowing in TweetDeck

Recently, I noticed that although I had unfollowed @aplusk after the competition ended, his updates were still appearing in my feed. Once I noticed, I began using all the methods I could to attempt to unfollow, including TweetDeck’s “Unfollow” command, and the “off aplusk” command directly in Twitter, as suggested by one of the articles. Neither did the trick.

The profile page clearly shows I'm not following.

Finally, I stumbled across this gem of a solution in Twitter’s Support section. by way of explanation, it offers the suggestion that caching and database errors are causing the unfollow activity to not take. The workaround is a classic IT solution: try it again. By following and unfollowing the same account, and hoping that the database query doesn’t get corrupted again. So far, implementing this solution (twice) has not solved the problem for me.

Updates still appeared in my feed post-unfollow.

So is this just a simple case of database corruption? I’m not sure. I could argue for both sides. On one hand, @aplusk is an account with a lot of followers, and it probably stands a high chance of seeing a corrupted input in Twitter’s database for any given activity. On the other hand, I’ve been experiencing this problem two months after Twitter “fixed” this known problem. Furthermore, my good friend and Icrontic contributor @TheButterflyman has been experiencing the exact problem I’ve described. In fact, it was our discussion of this problem during E3 that prompted me to dig deeper.

In the end, I really don’t think there was a conspiracy or any nefarious goings-on causing my inability to unfollow @aplusk on Twitter. Ironically, many would consider Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter account worth following. It opens a human window on a celebrity, showing that he’s often just a regular guy, but at the same time @aplusk often involves himself in works of charity that are worthy of note. It’s something of a shame that the incredible difficulty in unfollowing has caused me to become frustrated to the point that I’ll be happy to never see Kutcher’s updates show up in my feed again.

Using the off command in Twitter

Popup result of the off command.