About

#UnfollowAMan is a satirical feminist hashtag campaign purportedly calling on Twitter users to protest against mansplaining and the men's rights movement at large by unfollowing a male Twitter user. Upon its introduction in late July 2014, the hashtag immediately became a topic of heated discussion among Twitter users in the continuation of precedent hashtag-based gender debates, most notably #YesAllWomen and #NotAllMen.

Origin

On July 27th, 2014, Buzzfeed writer Katie Notopoulos^[1] introduced the hashtag #UnfollowAMan and encouraged her followers to unfollow one male Twitter user they were already following. Within three days the tweet gained over 1,000 favorites and over 800 retweets.

Notopoulos was inspired to create the hashtag after unfollowing all men for six months, something she undertook after her fellow Buzzfeed employee Charlie Warzel^[8] created a series of internet-based challenges for himself and Medium writer Anil Dash^[7] challenged himself not to retweet anything tweeted out by a man for one year.

Precursor: #FollowATeen

#FollowATeen is a Twitter hashtag associated with a practical joke that involves following a random teenager on the microblogging site and covertly tweeting about his or her daily updates. #FollowATeen was first proposed by Something Awful writer David Thorpe via Twitter in late December 2011, who suggested that adults on Twitter should follow teenagers to get a perspective on modern teen life.

Spread

Media Coverage

On July 28th, Vocativ^[6] published an article titled "Today Is the Day to #UnfollowAMan" which covered the hashtag as well as the angry tweets it elicited from mens rights activists. On July 29th, Notopoulos published an article on Buzzfeed^[3] titled "Why I Created The #UnfollowAMan Movement" which explained her motivation for creating the hashtag, explaining she had unfollowed all the men she had been previously following six months prior to introducing the hashtag after realizing she was interacting with primarily men through Twitter, saying:

"Unfollowing men was more than just a silly stunt to try out for something to write about; I needed a change. A digital man cleanse, if you will. Maybe you do, too."

Also on July 29th, The Daily Dot^[4] published an article titled "One man's humble endorsement of #UnfollowAMan." Within three days the hashtag^[2] was tweeted out over 2,000 times.

Notable Examples

External References