According to Professor Sue B. Moon from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), there are two basic variables when analysing relationships in personal networks: building and breaking a relationship. There is, however, a lack of relationship break-up data in the sociology of online social networks as the platforms are designed to create and foster relationships. "It has been hard to capture and define 'break-ups'," she pointed out. The 'unfollow' action in Twitter, thus, offers a unique opportunity to researchers to study the dissolution of an online relationship," added the Professor.

Professor Sue Moon was presenting a study of Twitter users 'unfollow' behaviour at the recent Third International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo'11) hosted by the Singapore Management University and supported by the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, as well as the International Communication Association (ICA) and Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF).

"'Unfollow' in Twitter is an intentional action to break a relationship on the social media site, where there is no need for approval and no notification to the 'unfollowed' user," she explained.

The study conducted by Professor Sue Moon and other researchers from KAIST involved collecting daily snapshots of 1.2 million Korean-speaking users for 51 days and all their tweets.