What is the best course of action to take in removing or unfollowing someone on social media? This has never really occurred to me until now and the social network in question is Twitter. The task is especially delicate given how many people I follow that I know of in real life.
In terms of social media, especially in networks with a greater amount of anonymity than Facebook, I try to keep a low profile, especially from my real life friends (this is surprisingly not that hard to do!). Granted, I have used my real name and associated my name to my pseudonym which makes it easier for people to search for me but surprisingly apart from Facebook a greater amount of my friends don't go to other networks as regularly. But for the small few that do know me on Twitter I somehow feel obligated to keep following them despite knowing that the content of their posts are often not of substantial qualities.
This delicate balance on keeping my stream relevant for myself but at the same time keeping a politeness by following these friends of mine is quite a challenge. Now the question becomes, do I want to keep my stream clean? Or, would I rather subconsciously ignore these friends' posts? Given how small the amount is, I'm more than happy to keep it to the latter but not everyone has such a luxury.
I do realise it's not an obligation to follow those people that follow you first but those people that you know in real life, that you see almost every other day, there has to be some social media conflict in that regard. Especially when they're polluting your stream with irrelevant posts and clogging your stream.
But in any case, for my own sanity, I think I should just ignore the offending tweets and perhaps in the future stealthily unfollow this person.
