Twitter announces removal of another popular feature as shakeup continues

Brad Norton
Twitter on mobile

Twitter’s popular Circles feature is now being removed, the platform – now known as X – just announced as its upper management continues to shake things up.

It’s been almost a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter for a reported $44 billion and in that time, there’s no denying things have been rather turbulent.

From controversial changes to the verification system, the more recent removal of various UI tools, to the supposed end of the blocking feature, the platform is going through considerable change under its new leadership.

With no signs of slowing down anytime soon, yet another popular aspect of the social media platform is now being removed. Circles, a feature that allowed users to share posts with only select followers, is now being sunset.

Subtly announced through the Twitter/X Support account on September 21, the platform confirmed its intentions to ‘disable’ the Circles feature over the coming weeks. By October 31, the feature is set to become a thing of the past.

“X is deprecating Circles as of Oct 31st, 2023,” a statement on the site’s help page now reads. “After this date, you will not be able to create new posts that are limited to your Circle, nor will you be able to add people to your Circle.”

Circles only just arrived on Twitter midway through 2022, making it one of the shortest-lived additions to the platform. Naturally, given many were just settling in with the tool, there was swift backlash to the announcement of its end.

“Add this to the list of horrible changes literally nobody asked for,” one user said in the replies. “I hope you want a lot more people to just either leave or make their accounts private,” another added in frustration.

“Why must we continue to ruin [the] platform?”

Twitter Circles feature

For now, it appears no amount of backlash will have the platform revert its decision before the October 31 deadline.

Though with all the changes of late, Twitter’s new CEO has assured the platform is heading in the right direction and that “better” additions will take their place.