Softblocking: Disconnective Practices, Imagined Affordances, and Reciprocity on Twitter

This study investigates the social meaning of softblocking, a practice on social media in which a user blocks and then immediately unblocks another user, causing a mutual unfollowing. This study finds that softblocking highlights that social media users exercise agency in creating imagined affordances through novel use of pre-installed features to do social work. It also discusses what the rise of softblocking suggests about the demand for reciprocity within social media interaction. With a corpus of 96,541 tweets mentioning softblocking from 2009 to 2020 and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this study explores (1) how softblocking is differentiated from pre-packaged affordances, (2) how softblocking is negotiated metadiscursively, and (3) how expectations of reciprocity are addressed by softblocking. I find that users expect sustained interaction and value-sharing with those they are in mutual following relationships with and also expect these relationships to be broken reciprocally. This study argues that softblocking meets the demand for disconnective action in a mutual manner, in line with emerging norms of politeness on social media that see reciprocity as politeness.