# Why there is no remove button
The fastest way to settle this is to read the list of things Twitch's API is allowed to do to another account on your behalf. The Helix reference is a complete inventory — if a capability is not in it, no dashboard control and no third-party tool can conjure it. Search it for the word follow and you find endpoints that read follows, and none that end one.
Get Channel Followers is documented as an endpoint that “Gets a list of users that follow the specified broadcaster. You can also use this endpoint to see whether a specific user follows the broadcaster.”[3] Read-only, by design. There is no counterpart that writes to that relationship from the broadcaster's side.
no, there's no dedicated endpoint to do that because there's rarely a legitimate reason to make a person unfollow that you don't also want to block— Dist, forum moderator, Twitch Developer Forums, 27 March 2023
Two years earlier, in a thread specifically asking how to remove several followers at once, BarryCarlyon gave the same answer — “there is no API to do that” — and then dismantled the workaround people reach for, a request against the old follows endpoint: “this example requires authorization from from_id and this would remove you from following them. Not what your end goal is.”[5] In other words, the only account that can cancel a follow with its own authorisation is the follower. You cannot borrow their authorisation, and Twitch will not act as proxy for it.
# What each Twitch action actually does
Most of the contradictory advice on this query comes from treating ban, block, timeout and report as interchangeable severity levels. They are not. They act on different objects, and only one of them touches the follow relationship. Twitch's own endpoint descriptions are the cleanest way to see the difference, because each one states its scope in a single sentence.
| Action | Documented effect | Ends the follow? |
|---|---|---|
| Block user | Blocks the account from interacting with or having contact with the broadcaster | Yes — the only one |
| Ban user (channel ban) | Bans the account from participating in the broadcaster's chat room | No |
| Timeout | The same chat-room restriction, time-limited; Unban User removes the ban or the timeout | No |
| Report | Sends the account to Twitch for review; the outcome is Twitch's decision, not yours | Only if Twitch suspends the account |
The Block User endpoint is described as one that “Blocks the specified user from interacting with or having contact with the broadcaster”, and it requires a user access token carrying the user:manage:blocked_users scope.[1] Note whose token that is: yours. Blocking is a first-person action taken by your account against another account. That detail decides the moderator question further down this page.
# Blocking: the only method, step by step
There is no bulk control and no dedicated screen. Blocking is done one account at a time, from that account's profile or from a chat message, and it works the same way whether the person is a follower, a lurker or a stranger.
- Find the account. Click the username in chat, or open
twitch.tv/<username>directly. If you are working from your follower list, it lives in the Creator Dashboard under Community — our guide to seeing your followers on Twitch covers where that moved to and what it shows. - Open the overflow menu. The three-dot control sits next to the username on the profile card and next to the message in chat.
- Choose Block. The menu item names the account explicitly, so read it before confirming — this is the one step you cannot take back cleanly.
- Check it stuck. Blocked accounts are listed in Settings → Security and Privacy, under the blocked-users list, where they can also be removed again.
The mobile app is the same story with fewer entry points. There is no follower list to work from in the app, so you have to reach the account's profile directly — tap the username on a chat message, or search for it — and use the overflow menu there. Anyone searching for how to remove followers on Twitch mobile is looking for a screen that does not exist on desktop either.
# “Just ban them” — why that advice is wrong
One of the commercial pages currently ranking for this query tells readers that banning a user “not only restricts chat participation but also ensures that the user does not continue to follow or harass you”. The first half is right and the second half is not something Twitch documents anywhere.
Twitch defines the action precisely: Ban User “Bans a user from participating in a broadcaster's chat room or puts them in a timeout”, and Unban User “Removes the ban or timeout that was placed on the specified user”.[2] Both sentences are scoped to the chat room. Nothing in either one reaches the follow relationship, and there is no second effect listed.
The practical consequence matters more than the pedantry. If you ban a harasser and assume the follow is gone, they keep receiving your go-live notifications. A ban stops them talking; a block stops them arriving. For anything that is genuinely a safety problem rather than a chat-conduct problem, the block is the action that does the work, and our guide to managing harassment in Twitch chat covers the mod-tool layer that sits around it.
# Mass removal and the third-party tools
“How to mass remove followers on Twitch” is a real and frequent search, and the tools that turn up for it are real too. CommanderRoot's follower remover has been the best-known one for years, and its page describes itself simply: “This tool lets you remove followers from your Twitch account”, with filters by follow date, account creation date, the gap between account creation and follow, username and subscription status.[6]
Set that next to the developer reference and there is an obvious tension. No endpoint removes a follow. The tool removes follows. Both statements are on Twitch-adjacent surfaces and both look accurate. Something has to reconcile them, and the tool's own page does not say what.
There is also a warning about this specific tool from the same forum, and it is not about the mechanism. Replying to the 2021 request for bulk follower removal, moderator Dist wrote that third-party tools “can actually be harmful to your channel as it's possible to either misuse the tool and block all followers, or even if you limit it to just his 'bot list' you'll still block legitimate users as his bot list has proven to contain false-positives”.[5] That is a moderator's assessment from 2021 rather than a current audit, but it names the failure mode precisely: the filter, not the removal, is what costs you real followers.
Two things are worth knowing regardless of mechanism. First, any tool that shows you individual followers has to hold a token with the moderator:read:followers scope, because Twitch returns detail only when the requesting user is the broadcaster or one of their moderators; without that, “only the total follower count will be included in the response”.[3] Granting that scope is the price of entry for every follower tool, legitimate or otherwise. Second, the removals are one-way, at whatever scale you run them, and a filter set slightly too wide will take real people with it.
# Bot followers: the case for doing nothing
Most people arriving at this question are not trying to remove a person. They have been hit by a follow-bot wave — several hundred empty accounts arriving in a few minutes, often as harassment rather than as a favour — and they want them off the channel before the ratio looks bought. The instinct is to reach for a bulk remover. The instinct is usually wrong.
In that 2021 forum thread, moderator Dist's response to a request for bulk follower removal pointed at Twitch's own guidance: do not manually block them, because Twitch bans the bot accounts itself.[5] That is a moderator's summary from 2021 rather than a current Twitch policy statement, so treat it as direction rather than a guarantee — but it matches the observable behaviour, which is that follower counts fall on their own in the weeks after a wave as Twitch removes the accounts.
- Blocking is per-account and irreversible. Clearing four hundred bots by hand is four hundred permanent actions, each carrying a real chance of catching a genuine follower whose account happens to be new and quiet.
- Twitch's own removal is free and reversible in the sense that matters — it never touches real accounts, so nothing legitimate is lost.
- Your count will drop either way. A follower number that falls without anyone unfollowing is normal, and the mechanics of that are covered in our guide to seeing your followers.
- The visible problem is usually the ratio, not the followers. If the worry is that the channel now looks inorganic to viewers or to a sponsor, the diagnosis belongs in our guide to checking a Twitch channel for fake viewers, which sets out what the public trackers actually measure.
If the ratio is the real problem
A follower count that sits far ahead of live viewers is what makes a channel read as botted — to sponsors and to the viewers deciding whether to click. Streamrise paces Twitch followers and viewers across days rather than dropping them in a spike, so the two curves move together instead of diverging.
# The bottom line
Twitch does not let you remove a follower, and the reason is visible in its API rather than hidden in policy: nothing in the Helix reference writes to the follow relationship from the broadcaster's side, and Twitch's forum moderators have said so directly on both occasions it has been asked. The one action that ends a follow is a block, it is taken from your own account one person at a time, and it is permanent in the strongest sense — not even Twitch can put the follow back.
So the decision is simpler than the search results suggest. If somebody is a genuine problem, block them and accept that the door is shut. If the goal is to tidy up after a bot wave, doing nothing is usually the better play, because Twitch clears those accounts itself and a bulk removal buys the same outcome at the cost of irreversibility. And if a guide tells you to ban them instead, check its source against the endpoint description — a ban is a chat restriction and always has been.
# Frequently asked questions
Can you remove followers on Twitch?
Not directly. Twitch ships no remove-follower control, and its API has no endpoint that ends someone else's follow — a Twitch developer-forum moderator answered a request for exactly that with “there is no API to do that”. Blocking the account is the only documented action that removes the follow, and it also prevents them following again while the block is in place.
How do I remove followers on the Twitch mobile app?
The same way as on desktop, and for the same reason: by blocking. The mobile app has no follower list to work from, so open the account's profile — by tapping their username on a chat message or searching for it — then use the three-dot menu and choose Block. There is no mobile-only method, because the feature people are looking for does not exist on any platform.
Can moderators remove followers?
No. Twitch's Block User endpoint requires a user access token with the user:manage:blocked_users scope, which means the block is an action your own account takes against another account. A moderator blocking someone blocks them from the moderator's account, not from yours. Moderators can read your follower list — the Get Channel Followers endpoint accepts a moderator token — but reading it is the extent of the delegated permission.
If I unblock someone, do they follow me again?
No. The follow is destroyed, not paused. CommanderRoot's follower tool states the position plainly: “There is no way to restore a follow, even for Twitch. Only the user itself can re-follow (if you didn't also block).” Unblocking restores their ability to follow you; it does not restore the follow. Twitch support cannot reinstate it either.
Does banning someone remove them as a follower?
No. Twitch documents Ban User as banning an account “from participating in a broadcaster's chat room or puts them in a timeout”, and Unban User as removing that ban or timeout. Both are scoped to chat. A banned account stays on your follower list and keeps receiving your go-live notifications. If that is not the outcome you want, you need a block rather than a ban.
Does the person know I removed them?
Twitch does not send a notification for it, but a block is discoverable. The blocked account loses the ability to interact with your channel, which is visible to them the moment they try. Anyone watching their own following list will also see your channel disappear from it. Treat blocking as a visible action rather than a silent one — the absence of a notification is not the same as the absence of a signal.
How do I remove bot followers on Twitch?
Usually by leaving them alone. Twitch removes follow-bot accounts on its own schedule, and a Twitch developer-forum moderator has pointed at Twitch's guidance not to block them manually for that reason. Blocking bots by hand is one irreversible action per account, with a real risk of catching quiet real accounts in the filter. If a wave arrives as part of a hate raid, the urgent controls are Shield Mode, AutoMod and a report — not the follower list.
Can I remove all my followers and start over?
There is no reset. Every removal is an individual block, each one permanent, and none of them can be reversed into a follow again. Deleting and recreating the channel is the only thing that clears the count, and it costs the account, the VODs, the emotes and any Affiliate status attached to it — status that has to be re-earned from the 25-follower threshold upward, which our Twitch Affiliate guide walks through.