Why I Am Unfollowing

Many of my Twitter follows may notice I am in process of cleaning up my account and unfollowing several. Due to my medical condition, I need to reduce stress in my life. I get upset while reading certain tweets. I've tried muting and lists, but it's time to take out the shears and prune back my follows, particularly since I randomly followed anyone. 

I am sure many of the ones I unfollow are nice people. I need to take care of myself at this time. If you tweet "@" my account, I will continue to respond. But I cannot follow you for these reasons:

- You are not following me. If you are not following me, why must I follow you?

- Inactive accounts for 8 months or more. Some have been inactive for up to 5 years. It's been a long time since I last pruned. 

- Hate tweets. This includes but is not limited to anti-gay, anti-muslim, anti-Christian, and especially the anti-Obama, conservative tweets that have become particularly nasty. This stresses me more than most, particularly from self-proclaimed Christians who do not follow Christ's teachings. 

- Ads / Sales Pitches / Promotions. I know several accounts are out there to make money or promote a product, but I am not interested in having these in my tweet stream. 

- Make Money Tweets. Similar to ads, I am not interested in these, including marketing advice. 

- Contests / Giveaways / Win Prizes. I do not want to "check out" something, particularly when asked for my email address, personal information or computer cookies. 

- Pornography and Solicitous tweets. No, I am not interested in how big your breasts are, details of male anatomy, having sex with you, or watching you have sex. 

- Facebook / Instantgram / Others. These are tweets that are either the link alone or are cut off with the link at the end. If I must go to another social media site to see the full message, I don't want to read it. 

-  Just links. The same as above, with the added caution that I don't know where the link will take me. I don't want trojans on my computer. If I cannot see the link address or see a preview on the Twitter page, I will not follow. 

- Automatic Tweets. These include horoscopes, iPapers, follow/unfollow counts, and others. These are particularly irksome in inactive accounts, which makes it impossible for search engines to identify it as inactive. 

- Tweets used to gain followers. I'm looking for more substance and less focus on how many followers you can get. 

- Tweets that are groups of names only. Primarily these are used for the same purpose as above and unfollowed for the same reason. 

- Repeated tweets, including those who retweet themselves. I don't want to read the same tweet multiple times. 

- SHOUTING TWEETS. TWEETS THAT ARE IN ALL CAPS may catch the readers attention, but if you are constantly shouting it is irksome. 

- #Hash#tag# #Extreme#. Tweets where almost every word is marked with a hashtag are not only difficult to read; it is impossible for online translators to translate. One does not need a hashtag to trend on twitter; the same for searching on Twitter. 

- iRegUlar Grmr. Irregular use of capitalization and grammar may be creative, save on the character count, but it is difficult for me to read, and does not translate. 

So, if I have unfollowed you recently, now you know the reason. It is not anything against you personally, just a pruning of what I do not wish to read in my twitter stream. 

~ ESA