Automating a 4,000‑Account Twitter Purge Without Getting Banned

Why I decided to nuke 4,000 follows

I let my Twitter follow list grow way past sanity. Around 7,000 accounts. Old conference people. Dead startups. NFT experiments. Half the accounts had not posted in years.

My home feed felt like a cursed museum. Algorithmic guesses on top of ancient follows. Lots of noise, not much signal. So I decided to run a controlled purge on @RichardLemon.

The goal was aggressive but safe. Drop around 4,000 accounts. Cap at about 250 unfollows per day. Do it with automation but stay well inside Twitter’s rules so I did not wake up to a locked account.

This is how I actually built it, using my tool SureThing to orchestrate the whole thing.

The constraints you really have to respect

People get banned on Twitter for automation, but usually not for the reason they think. It is not the script that kills you. It is the pattern.

Here are the constraints I decided to respect from day one:

• Moderate daily unfollow cap. I hard-capped myself at 250 unfollows per day, even though plenty of tools brag about higher.
• No follow/unfollow churn. I refused to automate following back and then unfollowing later. That pattern screams spammer.
• Human-friendly timing. No bursts of 100 actions in 30 seconds. Spread over the daytime. Small batches.
• Only touch my own follows. No scraping random lists. No “growth hacking.” This was hygiene, not growth.

My philosophy: behave like an obsessive but plausible human. A person who sat down one week and thought “wow, this feed sucks, time to clean it up”, then went through it methodically.

Why I used SureThing instead of a one-off script

I could have written a single Python script, run it from my laptop, and called it a day. I do not like one-off scripts for anything that affects my main accounts.

They always start small, then grow into a pile of conditionals and commented-out code that I am scared to re-run six months later.

SureThing is my answer to that problem. It is a small automation framework I built that treats your recurring scripts like tiny production workflows. Jobs. Schedules. Logs. Retries. Think “crontab with opinions and visibility.”

For this project, SureThing gave me a few things I cared about:

• Durable schedule. Run every day at fixed times without reconfiguring anything.
• Clear logs. Exactly who I unfollowed, when, and why.
• Safety rails. If Twitter started returning weird errors, the workflow paused instead of plowing ahead.

That matters when you are touching your main identity on the internet. I want change history, not vibes.